January 24, 2013
The dog that did not bark: The EITC for single mothers in the Netherlands
We study the extension of an EITC for single mothers in the Netherlands to mothers with a youngest child of 12 to 15 years old. This reform has increased the net income for the treatment group by 5%. Using both DD and RD, we show that this reform has had a negligible effect on labour participation with tight confidence intervals around zero.
Our results are at odds with a number of related studies. This is likely to be due to their use of single women without children as the control group, which in our case is an invalid control group.
