Steven Johnston

Ministry of Social Development

Using statistical methods to answer policy questions: Sole parents, employment incentives and benefit receipt

The Working for Families policy reforms introduced substantial changes to in-work incentives and financial support for families with dependent children. In this talk we describe one of a number of pieces of work to evaluate the impact of these reforms.

We used (discrete-time) survival analysis to examine changes in the length of time that sole parents spent on benefit and changes in the length of their subsequent spells off benefit. We describe some of the challenges we encountered, including that some individuals had more than one spell of benefit receipt, and finding suitable ways to present the results for a policy audience.

Our analysis used a new research dataset of linked MSD and Inland Revenue administrative data that allows us to track families on a monthly basis from 2003 onwards.