Effects of labeled child benefits on family savings

Hener, Timo

doi:10.1007/s11150-015-9291-z

Cited by 9 publications

(10 citation statements)

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“…Keane and Moffitt (1998); Moffitt (1983); Ranney and Kushman (1987) suggest that welfare or food stamps might induce stigma among recipients. In the labeling effects literature, Kooreman (2000), Abeler and Marklein (2008) and Hener (2013) show that certain income sources are more likely to be spent on particular items for the household, perhaps as the result of an implicit social contract. However, Case and Deaton (1998) find no differential use of South African pensions on household expenditures relative to earned income.…”

Section: A4 Social Normsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Government Transfers, Work, and Wellbeing: Evidence from the Russian Old-Age Pension

Grogan

Summerfield

2019

J Popul Econ

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Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but IZA takes no institutional policy positions. The IZA research network is committed to the IZA Guiding Principles of Research Integrity. The IZA Institute of Labor Economics is an independent economic research institute that conducts research in labor economics and offers evidence-based policy advice on labor market issues. Supported by the Deutsche Post Foundation, IZA runs the world's largest network of economists, whose research aims to provide answers to the global labor market challenges of our time. Our key objective is to build bridges between academic research, policymakers and society. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author.

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Section: A4 Social Normsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Government Transfers, Work, and Wellbeing: Evidence from the Russian Old-Age Pension

Grogan

Summerfield

2019

J Popul Econ

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“…Labelling does not seem to extend to education expenses (cf. Hener, 2017), however, where disparities in spending across families are more pronounced at the baseline (Figure 2). Expenditures on adult-assignable goods, clothing in particular, also decrease for families affected by FTB-B reforms.…”

Section: Main Findingsmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Alternatively then, studies have investigated interventions encouraging the labelling of cash benefits, avoiding problematic comparisons of the MPC across income sources. Some have exploited policy reforms boosting family cash benefits differentially across families, depending on household income, household composition, and area of residence (Gregg et al, 2006;Hener, 2017;Lyssiotou, 2018;Lenhart, 2019;Jones et al, 2019). One randomised control trial combined an unconditional cash transfer with targeted messaging to elicit parental investments in children's education (Benhassine et al, 2015).…”

Section: Previous Evidencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…where Y hw is one of eight expenditure items, selected for comparability with previous studies on labelling (e.g. Kooreman, 2000;Gregg et al, 2006;Blow et al, 2012;Hener, 2017;Jones et al, 2019). These are expenditures on 1) children's clothing and footwear and 2) education fees for child-assignable goods; 3) utility bills, 4) home repairs, renovations and maintenance, and 5) groceries to tap into the home environment affecting the child; 6) adult clothing and footwear, 7) alcohol, and 8) cigarettes and tobacco for adult-assignable goods.…”

Section: Identification Measures and Econometric Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Indeed, households seem to disproportionately assign income from family cash benefits to child goods, clothing in particular, and child-oriented savings (e.g. Kooreman, 2000;Hener, 2017;Lyssiotou, 2018).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Do high-income households 'label' family cash transfers? Evidence on family expenditures from Australia

Mari¹,

Keizer²

2021

Preprint

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Naming cash benefits with explicit reference to “families” or “children” can nudge households into labelling the extra cash for child goods and child-oriented savings. Labelling has mainly been assessed among lower-income households. Yet if also higher-income households engage in labelling, family cash benefits may very well help with the costs of raising children, but not mitigate stark disparities in child-related investments along the income distribution.Relatively overlooked, we thus examine the occurrence of labelling among higher-income households. We exploit recent reforms that progressively excluded high-income households from Australia’s main cash provision for families with children, Family Tax Benefit. We use longitudinal data from Household, Income, and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) and an instrumented difference-in-differences design. We find that, in the absence of reforms, higher-income households would have kept labelling Family Tax Benefit for child goods (clothing), substituting for adult goods (alcohol). Different from lower-income households, those with higher incomes in our sample do not seem to assign family cash benefits to essentials in the home environment. Finally, we find suggestive evidence that higher-income households earmark cash benefits for children’s education fees, not on average, but only when women are the main financial decision-maker in the household. We conclude that expenditure responses, heterogeneous across households, may inform the design of family cash benefits, especially when socioeconomic gaps in family investments are a concern.

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