chore(script): Sort by institution-structural-agency

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@ -670,16 +670,26 @@ Since policies employed in the pursuit of increased equality can take a wide for
the following synthesis will first categorize between the main thematic area and its associated interventions,
which are then distinguished between for their primary outcome inequalities.
## Universal basic income
## Institutional
An experimental study of providing UBI for villages in India by @Standing2015 looks at the effects on absolute low-income household debts, utilizing a combination of qualitative and quantitative experimental research.
It finds that the provision of UBI significantly reduced household debts, finding generally agreeing with assumptions in the literature, but goes beyond this by investigating the qualitative causes going beyond purely monetary value into what the authors call 'emancipatory value'.
They find UBI reduces dependency risk - primarily to lenders with high associated fees by allowing the repayment of existing debt, not having to work for the lender directly or by providing them parts of their wages, avoiding taking on new debts and, if new debts have to be taken on, allows choosing less exploitative forms of borrowing (such as from relatives or friends).
The last channel especially is a point of interest of the study: the intervention did not just reduce absolute debts through an individual possessing more money, it generally infused more money into the local contexts, reducing its scarcity and allowing others such as neighbors and friends to provide more collective risk spreading in the villages..
The intervention also significantly increased possibility of saving in treatment households, allowing for an increased economic security and empowerment, which was also influenced by houshold head education, landholding, the household's caste and size.
The main channel this is accomplished through is a shift to institutionalized saving, with provides increased resilience against shock events.
<!-- ALMP -->
@Whitworth2021 analyse the spatial consequences of a UK work programme on spatial factors of job deprivation or opportunity increases.
The programme follows a quasi-marketized approach of rewarding employment-favourable results of transitions into employment and further sustained months in employment.
The author argues, however, that the non-spatial implementation of the policy leads to spatial outcomes.
Founded on the approach of social 'creaming' and 'parking' and applied to the spatial dimension,
the study shows that already job-deprived areas indeed experience further deprivations under the programme,
while non-deprived areas are correlated with positive impacts, thereby further deteriorating spatial inequality outcomes.
This occurs because of providers in the programme de-prioritizing the already deprived areas ('parking') in favour prioritizing wealthier areas for improved within-programme results.
## Minimum wage
<!-- health care -->
@Carstens2018 conduct an analysis of the potential factors influencing mentally ill individuals in the United States to participate in the labour force, using correlation between different programmes of Medicaid and labour force status.
In trying to find labour force participation predictors it finds employment motivating factors in reduced depression and anxiety, increased responsibility and problem-solving and stress management being positive predictors.
In turn barriers of increased stress, discrimination based on their mental, loss of free time, loss of government benefits and tests for illegal drugs were listed as barriers negatively associated with labour force participation.
For the government benefits, it finds significant variations for the different varieties of Medicaid programmes, with the strongest netagive labour force participation correlated to Medicaid ABD, a programme for which it has to be demonstrated that an individual cannot work due to their disability.
The authors suggest this shows the primary channel of the programme becoming a benefit trap, with disability being determined by not working and benefits disappearing when participants enter the labour force, creating dependency to the programme as a primary barrier.
Two limitations of the study are its small sample size due to a low response rate, and an over-representation of racial minorities, women and older persons in the sample mentioned as introducing possible downward bias for measured labour force participation rates.
### Minimum wage
@Alinaghi2020 conduct a study using a microsimulation to estimate the effects of a minimum wage increase in New Zealand on overall income inequality and further disaggregation along gender and poverty lines.
It finds limited redistributional effects for the policy, with negligible impact on overall income inequality and the possibility of actually increasing inequalities among lower percentile income households.
@ -719,15 +729,9 @@ The channels for the policies effects are two-fold in that there is an inequalit
as well as the concentration of workers at the minimum level mattering --- the probable channel for a larger impact on women since they make up larger parts of low-income and minimum wage households in Romania.
Limitations to the study are some remaining unobservables for the final inequality outcomes (such as other wages or incomes), the sample over-representing employees and not being able to account for any tax evasion or behavioural changes in the model.
@Cieplinski2021 undertake a simulation study on the income inequality effects of both a policy targeting a reduction in working time and the introduction of a UBI in Italy.
It finds that while both decrease overall income inequality, measured through Gini coefficient, they do so through different channels.
While provision of a UBI sustains aggregate demand, thereby spreading income in a more equitable manner,
working time reductions significantly decrease aggregate demand through lower individual income but significantly increases labour force participation and thus employment.
It also finds that through these channels of changing aggregate demand, the environmental outcomes are oppositional, with work time reduction decreasing and UBI increasing the overall ecological footprint.
One limitation of the study is the modeling assumption that workers will have to accept both lower income and lower consumption levels under a policy of work time reduction through stable labour market entry for the results to hold.
## Maternity and child-care benefits
### Paid leave and child care
<!-- maternity leave and benefits -->
@Broadway2020 study the introduction of universal paid maternal leave in Australia, looking at its impacts on mothers returning to work and the conditions they return under.
It finds that, while there is a short-term decrease of mothers returning to work since they make use of the introduced leave period, over the long-term (after six to nine months) there is a significant positive impact on return to work.
Furthermore, there is a positive impact on returning to work in the same job and under the same conditions,
@ -747,19 +751,6 @@ though the authors do not form an inference on why this difference would be.
A limitation of the study is that there was a simultaneous child care capacity increase in the country,
which may bias the labour market results due to being affected by both the cost reduction and the capacity increase.
@Clark2019 undertake an experimental study on the impacts of providing childcare vouchers to poor women in urban Kenya, estimating the impacts on their economic empowerment.
The empowerment is measured through disaggregated analyses of maternal income, employment probability and hours worked.
It finds that, for married mothers there was a significantly positive effect on employment probability and hours worked, suggesting their increased ability to work through lower childcare costs increasing personal agency.
For single mothers, it finds a negative effect on hours worked, though with a stable income.
The authors suggest this is due to single Kenyan mothers already working increased hours compared to married mothers, though the effect shows the ability of single mothers to shift to jobs with more regular hours, even if they are not compatible with childcare.
Minor limitations of the study are its restriction to effects within a period of 1 year, and a somewhat significant attrition rate to the endline survey.
@Hojman2019, in an experimental study looking at the effects of providing free childcare for poor urban mothers in Nicaragua under the 'Programo Urbano', examine the effects on inequality for mothers and children.
It finds that providing free childcare for young children of poor mothers significantly increases the employment probability of the mothers (14ppts) independently of the childcare quality.
It also finds significantly positive impacts on the human capital of the children, though dependent on the quality of childcare facilities.
This suggests childcare costs being removed through a quasi-subsidy reducing the required childcare time burden on mothers, increasing parental agency and employment choices.
Some limitations to the study include a relatively small overall sample size, as well as employment effects becoming insignificant when the effect is measured on randomization alone (without an additional instrumental variable).
@Davies2022 conduct a study on the return to work ratios for high-skill women workers in public academic universities in the United Kingdom, comparing the results for those in fixed-term contract work versus those in open-ended contracts.
It finds that there is a significantly decreased return to work probability for those working under fixed-term contracts, and most universities providing policies with more limited access to maternity payment for fixed-contract staff.
This is possibly due to provisions in the policies implicitly working against utilization under fixed-terms:
@ -775,92 +766,23 @@ The authors suggest the additional promotions were primarily based on voluntary
Additionally, the authors make the conjecture that the welfare paradox may rather be due to supply-side mechanisms, based on individual career planning, as well as reinforced along existing gender divisions of household labour which may increase alongside the laws.
Limitations of the study include foremost its limited generalizability due to the unique Japanese institutional labour market structure (with many employments, for example, being within a single firm until retirement), as well as no ability yet to measure the true causes and effects of adhering to the voluntary incentive-based labour policies, with lasting effects or done as symbolic compliance efforts and mere impression management.
## Health care
<!-- childcare subsidy -->
@Clark2019 undertake an experimental study on the impacts of providing childcare vouchers to poor women in urban Kenya, estimating the impacts on their economic empowerment.
The empowerment is measured through disaggregated analyses of maternal income, employment probability and hours worked.
It finds that, for married mothers there was a significantly positive effect on employment probability and hours worked, suggesting their increased ability to work through lower childcare costs increasing personal agency.
For single mothers, it finds a negative effect on hours worked, though with a stable income.
The authors suggest this is due to single Kenyan mothers already working increased hours compared to married mothers, though the effect shows the ability of single mothers to shift to jobs with more regular hours, even if they are not compatible with childcare.
Minor limitations of the study are its restriction to effects within a period of 1 year, and a somewhat significant attrition rate to the endline survey.
@Carstens2018 conduct an analysis of the potential factors influencing mentally ill individuals in the United States to participate in the labour force, using correlation between different programmes of Medicaid and labour force status.
In trying to find labour force participation predictors it finds employment motivating factors in reduced depression and anxiety, increased responsibility and problem-solving and stress management being positive predictors.
In turn barriers of increased stress, discrimination based on their mental, loss of free time, loss of government benefits and tests for illegal drugs were listed as barriers negatively associated with labour force participation.
For the government benefits, it finds significant variations for the different varieties of Medicaid programmes, with the strongest netagive labour force participation correlated to Medicaid ABD, a programme for which it has to be demonstrated that an individual cannot work due to their disability.
The authors suggest this shows the primary channel of the programme becoming a benefit trap, with disability being determined by not working and benefits disappearing when participants enter the labour force, creating dependency to the programme as a primary barrier.
Two limitations of the study are its small sample size due to a low response rate, and an over-representation of racial minorities, women and older persons in the sample mentioned as introducing possible downward bias for measured labour force participation rates.
@Hojman2019, in an experimental study looking at the effects of providing free childcare for poor urban mothers in Nicaragua under the 'Programo Urbano', examine the effects on inequality for mothers and children.
It finds that providing free childcare for young children of poor mothers significantly increases the employment probability of the mothers (14ppts) independently of the childcare quality.
It also finds significantly positive impacts on the human capital of the children, though dependent on the quality of childcare facilities.
This suggests childcare costs being removed through a quasi-subsidy reducing the required childcare time burden on mothers, increasing parental agency and employment choices.
Some limitations to the study include a relatively small overall sample size, as well as employment effects becoming insignificant when the effect is measured on randomization alone (without an additional instrumental variable).
## Training & Accomodation
## Structural
Similarly, @Shepherd-Banigan2021 undertake a qualitative study on the significance of vocational and educational training provided for disabled veterans in the United States.
It finds that both the vocational and educational services help strengthen individual agency, autonomy and motivation but impacts can be dampened if the potential for disability payment loss due to the potential for job acquisition impedes skill development efforts.
The primary barriers of return to work efforts identified are an individual's health problems as well as various programmes not acommodating the needs of disabled veteran students,
while the primary Facilitators identified are financial assistance provided for education as well as strengthened individual agency through motivation.
Some limitations include a possible bias of accommodations required through the sample being restricted to veterans with a caregiver, which often signals more substantial impairments than for a larger training-participatory sample, as well as the data not being able to identify the impact of supported employment.
An experimental study on the impacts of benefits and vocational training counseling for disabled veterans in the United States by @Rosen2014 measures the effects on return to work through average hours worked.
It identifies time worked through a timeline follow-back calendar, measuring the change in days worked in the 28 days preceding the final study measurement.
Here, it finds the sessions having a significant increase on more waged days worked, with an additional three days for the 28 preceding days on average.
One limitation is the inability of the study to locate an active ingredient:
Though the intervention clearly aims at strengthening some aspect of individual agency, the exact mediators are not clear, with neither beliefs about work, beliefs about benefits, nor provided service use for mental health or substance abuse impacted significantly.
The studies thus not only reinforce recommendations for strength-based approaches, emphasizing the benefits of work, but also highlight the targeting importance of subsidy programmes in general on the one hand,
in the worst case reducing equity through bad targeting mechanisms,
and their negative reinforcement effects widening existing inequalities of gender, age and racial discrimination through such targeting on the other.
With a similar focus on agency, @Gates2000 conducts a qualitative study on the mechanisms of workplace accomodation for people with mental health conditions to allow their successful return-to-work.
The intervention is based on an accommodation which disaggregates the effects of social and technical components of the process and included a disclosure and psychoeducational plan.
It finds that successfull return-to-work through accommodation requires consideration of the social component ('who is involved'), with unsuccessful accommodation often only relying on the functional aspect ('what is involved').
The primary barrier identified for successful return-to-work are actually relationship issues not functional ones, with supervisors playing a key role for the success of the accommodation process.
Additionally, it highlighted the necessity of strengthening the individual agency of the returnee, accomplished in the intervention through a concrete training plan with the worker but also with other key workplace players such as the supervisors.
Additionally, providers must be willing to develop a disclosure plan with the employee and enter the workplace itself to adequately assist in the accommodation process.
Limitations to the study include the limited generalizability of its findings with a small non-randomized sample size and restriction to mental health disability.
A study looking at the effects of vocational rehabilitation on employment probabilities, @Poppen2017 look at the factors influencing successful employment for disabled people in the United States.
It finds that the primary factors negatively correlated with sucessful employment were for women in the sample, for having mental illness or traumatic brain injury as the primary disability, having multiple disabilities, an interpersonal or self-care impediment and receiving social security benefits.
On the other hand, having participated in a youth-transition training programme, as well as making use of more vocational rehabilitation services, are correlated with an increased employment probability.
It thereby highlights the gendered dimension of employment probabilities and points to a necessity to focus training and rehabilitation efforts along multiple dimensions.
Some limitations of the study include its limited generalizability, having a sample located in a single state, as well as a dataest intended for service provision not academic pursuits possibly introducing unreliability in its data and not measuring service quality.
## Direct Transfer
@Emigh2018 study the effects of direct state transfers to people in poverty in the post-socialist market transition countries of Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria.
It first lookst at the correlations of socio-demographic characteristics with poverty to find that in each country there was an increased probability for poverty of low-education, larger and predominantly Roma households.
It also found that poverty itself was most feminized Hungary, the country with the most advanced market transition in the study period, and least feminized in Bulgaria, the country with the least advanced market transition, and suggests that poverty may have feminized as the market transitions progressed.
For the state transfers it found that while the level of payments may have been too small to eliminate longer-term adverse effects of the market transitions,
in each country's case the transfers to individuals reduced their poverty and were beneficial at least in the short term.
The authors thus suggest that their findings may be compatible both with an institutionalist perspective seeing poverty-eliminating benefits in the short term and with an underclass perspective which contends that nonetheless the transfers do not eliminate the deprivations members of disadvantaged groups face, while providing little evidence for generating welfare dependency proposed in a more neoclassical perspective.
However, due to no long-term panel data available to fully analyse the underclass and neoclassical arguments, these findings should not be understood too generalizable.
@Wang2016 undertake an observational study on the levels of social assistance benefits and wages in a national comparative study within 26 developed countries.
It finds that real minimum income benefit levels generally increased in most countries from 1990 to 2009, with only a few countries, mostly in Eastern European welfare states, showing decreases during the time frame.
The majority of changes in real benefit levels are from deliberate policy changes and the study calculates them by a comparison of the changes in benefit levels to the changes in consumer prices.
Secondly, it finds that changes for income replacement rates are more mixed, with rates decreasing even in some countries which have increasing real benefits levels.
The study suggests this is because benefit levels are in most cases not linked to wages and policy changes also do not take changes in wages into account resulting in diverging benefit levels and wages, which may lead to exacerbating inequality gaps between income groups.
## Financial agency
@Al-Mamun2014 conduct a study on the impacts of an urban micro-finance programme in Malaysia on the economic empowerment of women.
The programme introduced the ability for low-income urban individuals to receive collateral-free credit.
The study finds that the programme, though not specifically aimed at women, indeed increased women's economic empowerment with an increase in household decision-making, as well as increased personal economic security.
Primarily this is due to the increased access to finance, though it also functions thorugh an increase of collective agency established for the women in organised meetings and trainings.
It also finds, however, that the empowerment outcomes are constrained by the inability for individuals to obtain loans, with the programme only disbursing group loans which are harder to achieve through obstacles to collective organisation by different racial and socio-demographic backgrounds in each dwelling.
The study is somewhat limited in its explanatory power since even through its random sampling design it can not establish control for all factors required in experimental design.
In turn, @Field2019 undertake an experimental study looking at the effects of granting women increased access to their own financial accounts and training on their employment and hours worked, as well as more long-term economic empowerment.
The background of the experiment was the rural Indian MGNREGS[^1] programme which, despite ostensibly mandated gender wage parity, runs the risk of discouraging female workers and restrictring their agency by depositing earned wages into a single household account --- predominantly owned by the male head of household.
To grant increased financial access, the treatment changed the deposits into newly opened individual accounts for the women workers, as well as providing additional training to some women.
It found that, short-term, the deposits into women's individual accounts in combination with provided training increased their labour supply, while longer-term there was an increased acceptance of female work in affected households and a significant increase in women's hours worked.
The impacts on increased hours worked were concentrated on those households where previously women worked relatively lower amounts and there were stronger norms against female work while less constrained households' impacts dissipated over time.
The authors suggest the primary channel is the newly increased bargaining power through having a greater control of one's income, and that it in turn also reflects onto gender norms themselves.
[^1]: The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, one of the largest redistribution programmes on the household level in the world, entitling each household to up to 100 days of work per year.
## ALMP
Similarly, @Whitworth2021 analyse the spatial consequences of a UK work programme on spatial factors of job deprivation or opportunity increases.
The programme follows a quasi-marketized approach of rewarding employment-favourable results of transitions into employment and further sustained months in employment.
The author argues, however, that the non-spatial implementation of the policy leads to spatial outcomes.
Founded on the approach of social 'creaming' and 'parking' and applied to the spatial dimension,
the study shows that already job-deprived areas indeed experience further deprivations under the programme,
while non-deprived areas are correlated with positive impacts, thereby further deteriorating spatial inequality outcomes.
This occurs because of providers in the programme de-prioritizing the already deprived areas ('parking') in favour prioritizing wealthier areas for improved within-programme results.
## Trade liberalization
### Trade liberalization
@Adams2015 study the effects of labour, business and credit regulations, FDI and school enrolment looks at their long-term correlations to income inequality in developing countries from 1970 to 2012.
They find that in MENA, SSA, LAC and to some extend AP increased labour and business regulations are actually negatively related to equitable income distribution, with market regulation not having significant effects.
@ -906,9 +828,32 @@ In Mexico, while the gap widened during the 1990s, it began closing again afterw
The differences in wage gap effects compared to both other countries and the respective country's physical labour market requirements show that contextual structural changes played a large role in each case:
with erstwhile reduced returns on Brazilian returns for brain intensive occupations, the introduction of a female-lead manufacturing sector in Mexico in the 90s, and widely diverging basic labour market skill structures in Thailand and India necessitating subsistence-oriented participation; the results show impacts of structural changes, though limited through a variety of mediating factors influencing each case.
## Infrastructure: Transport networks and climate adaption
### Education
### Climate change
<!-- education -> gender economic empowerment -->
Looking at the returns of the Tanzanian 'Universal Primary Education' programme on consumption and on rural labour market outcomes, @Delesalle2021, finds outcomes that additionally differ along spatial and gender lines.
The programme both attempted to increase access to schools but also changed curricula to contain more technical classes, judged relevant to increase equity in rural areas.
Even though the programme aims to increase universal equality of access to education, the study finds that gender, geographical and income inequalities persist throughout, with individuals that complete primary education more likely to be male urban wage workers.
The study measures returns purely on consumption of households to show the estimated effect on their productivity ---
here, it finds generally positive returns but greatest for non-agricultural work, self-employed or as wage work.
Importantly, the introduction of more technical classes, however, also changes employment sector choices, with men working less in agricultural work and more in non-farm wage sectors and an increased probability for rural women to both work in agriculture and to work formally.
Limitations of the study include the inability to directly identify intervention compliers and having to construct returns for each household head only and a possibly unobserved 'villagization' effect by bringing people together in community villages for their education leading to other unobserved variable impacting the returns.
@Pi2016 conduct a study on the impacts of allowing increased access to social welfare provisions and education to urban migrants in China, looking at the effects on wage inequality between skilled and unskilled sectors and workers.
It uses skilled-unskilled inequality instead of rural-urban inequalities since the real wages of the rural sector are already much lower in China, making comparisons along the 90th to 10th decile ratios more difficult.
The study finds that reforms to increase access to social security and education for urban migrants decreases wage inequality between the sectors if the skilled sector is more capital intensive than the unskilled sector, though it makes no specific identification of individual channels.
There are several limitations to the study such as no disaggregation between the private and the (very important for the Chinese economy) public sector, job searching not being part of the model, and, most importantly, a severely restricted generalizability due to the reform characteristics being strongly bound to the institutional contexts of Chinese *hukou*[^hukou] systems.
[^hukou]: The hukou system generally denotes a permission towards either rural land-ownership and agricultural subsidies for the rural hukou or social welfare benefits and employment possibilities for the urban hukou, and children of migrants often have to go back to their place of registered residence for their collece entrance examination. This study looks at reforms undoing some of the restrictions under the sytem.
@Thome2017 study the effects of structural changes on married women's employment in South Korea, looking specifically at the impact of education and family structure.
It finds that educational interventions significantly increase the employment probability of married women, and it finds overall female labour force participation showing a negative correlation with income inequality.
However, education alone is only a necessary not a sufficient condition for increased employment, with a married woman's family size and family structure having an impact as well.
Finally, education also has an intergenerational impact, with the female education also positively relating to daughters' education levels.
### Infrastructural change
#### Climate change adaption
@Kuriyama2021 look at the effects of Japan's move to decarbonise its energy sector on employment, especially rural employment.
It finds that, while employment in general is positively affected, especially rural sectors benefit from additional employment probability.
@ -925,7 +870,7 @@ An insignificant amount of women from local villages were working at the solar p
The author suggests this is an example of institutional design neglecting individual agency and structural power relations, especially intersectional inequalities between gender and caste.
The study is limited in explanatory power through its observational design, not being able to make causal inferences.
### Transport networks
#### Transport networks
<!-- explicitly spatial policies -->
@Blumenberg2014 look at the effects of a housing mobility intervention in the United States on employment for disadvantaged households,
@ -953,28 +898,89 @@ and that much of the increases in welfare are based on movement of rural workers
The study creates causal inferences but is limited in its modelling approach representing a limited subset of empirical possibility spaces,
as well as having to make the assumption of no population growth for measures to hold.
## Education
## Agency-oriented
<!-- education -> gender economic empowerment -->
Looking at the returns of the Tanzanian 'Universal Primary Education' programme on consumption and on rural labour market outcomes, @Delesalle2021, finds outcomes that additionally differ along spatial and gender lines.
The programme both attempted to increase access to schools but also changed curricula to contain more technical classes, judged relevant to increase equity in rural areas.
Even though the programme aims to increase universal equality of access to education, the study finds that gender, geographical and income inequalities persist throughout, with individuals that complete primary education more likely to be male urban wage workers.
The study measures returns purely on consumption of households to show the estimated effect on their productivity ---
here, it finds generally positive returns but greatest for non-agricultural work, self-employed or as wage work.
Importantly, the introduction of more technical classes, however, also changes employment sector choices, with men working less in agricultural work and more in non-farm wage sectors and an increased probability for rural women to both work in agriculture and to work formally.
Limitations of the study include the inability to directly identify intervention compliers and having to construct returns for each household head only and a possibly unobserved 'villagization' effect by bringing people together in community villages for their education leading to other unobserved variable impacting the returns.
### Training & Accommodation
@Pi2016 conduct a study on the impacts of allowing increased access to social welfare provisions and education to urban migrants in China, looking at the effects on wage inequality between skilled and unskilled sectors and workers.
It uses skilled-unskilled inequality instead of rural-urban inequalities since the real wages of the rural sector are already much lower in China, making comparisons along the 90th to 10th decile ratios more difficult.
The study finds that reforms to increase access to social security and education for urban migrants decreases wage inequality between the sectors if the skilled sector is more capital intensive than the unskilled sector, though it makes no specific identification of individual channels.
There are several limitations to the study such as no disaggregation between the private and the (very important for the Chinese economy) public sector, job searching not being part of the model, and, most importantly, a severely restricted generalizability due to the reform characteristics being strongly bound to the institutional contexts of Chinese *hukou*[^hukou] systems.
Similarly, @Shepherd-Banigan2021 undertake a qualitative study on the significance of vocational and educational training provided for disabled veterans in the United States.
It finds that both the vocational and educational services help strengthen individual agency, autonomy and motivation but impacts can be dampened if the potential for disability payment loss due to the potential for job acquisition impedes skill development efforts.
The primary barriers of return to work efforts identified are an individual's health problems as well as various programmes not accommodating the needs of disabled veteran students,
while the primary Facilitators identified are financial assistance provided for education as well as strengthened individual agency through motivation.
Some limitations include a possible bias of accommodations required through the sample being restricted to veterans with a caregiver, which often signals more substantial impairments than for a larger training-participatory sample, as well as the data not being able to identify the impact of supported employment.
[^hukou]: The hukou system generally denotes a permission towards either rural land-ownership and agricultural subsidies for the rural hukou or social welfare benefits and employment possibilities for the urban hukou, and children of migrants often have to go back to their place of registered residence for their collece entrance examination. This study looks at reforms undoing some of the restrictions under the sytem.
An experimental study on the impacts of benefits and vocational training counselling for disabled veterans in the United States by @Rosen2014 measures the effects on return to work through average hours worked.
It identifies time worked through a timeline follow-back calendar, measuring the change in days worked in the 28 days preceding the final study measurement.
Here, it finds the sessions having a significant increase on more waged days worked, with an additional three days for the 28 preceding days on average.
One limitation is the inability of the study to locate an active ingredient:
Though the intervention clearly aims at strengthening some aspect of individual agency, the exact mediators are not clear, with neither beliefs about work, beliefs about benefits, nor provided service use for mental health or substance abuse impacted significantly.
@Thome2017 study the effects of structural changes on married women's employment in South Korea, looking specifically at the impact of education and family structure.
It finds that educational interventions significantly increase the employment probability of married women, and it finds overall female labour force participation showing a negative correlation with income inequality.
However, education alone is only a necessary not a sufficient condition for increased employment, with a married woman's family size and family structure having an impact as well.
Finally, education also has an intergenerational impact, with the female education also positively relating to daughters' education levels.
The studies thus not only reinforce recommendations for strength-based approaches, emphasizing the benefits of work, but also highlight the targeting importance of subsidy programmes in general on the one hand,
in the worst case reducing equity through bad targeting mechanisms,
and their negative reinforcement effects widening existing inequalities of gender, age and racial discrimination through such targeting on the other.
With a similar focus on agency, @Gates2000 conducts a qualitative study on the mechanisms of workplace accommodation for people with mental health conditions to allow their successful return-to-work.
The intervention is based on an accommodation which disaggregates the effects of social and technical components of the process and included a disclosure and psycho-educational plan.
It finds that successful return-to-work through accommodation requires consideration of the social component ('who is involved'), with unsuccessful accommodation often only relying on the functional aspect ('what is involved').
The primary barrier identified for successful return-to-work are actually relationship issues not functional ones, with supervisors playing a key role for the success of the accommodation process.
Additionally, it highlighted the necessity of strengthening the individual agency of the returnee, accomplished in the intervention through a concrete training plan with the worker but also with other key workplace players such as the supervisors.
Additionally, providers must be willing to develop a disclosure plan with the employee and enter the workplace itself to adequately assist in the accommodation process.
Limitations to the study include the limited generalizability of its findings with a small non-randomized sample size and restriction to mental health disability.
A study looking at the effects of vocational rehabilitation on employment probabilities, @Poppen2017 look at the factors influencing successful employment for disabled people in the United States.
It finds that the primary factors negatively correlated with successful employment were for women in the sample, for having mental illness or traumatic brain injury as the primary disability, having multiple disabilities, an interpersonal or self-care impediment and receiving social security benefits.
On the other hand, having participated in a youth-transition training programme, as well as making use of more vocational rehabilitation services, are correlated with an increased employment probability.
It thereby highlights the gendered dimension of employment probabilities and points to a necessity to focus training and rehabilitation efforts along multiple dimensions.
Some limitations of the study include its limited generalizability, having a sample located in a single state, as well as a dataset intended for service provision not academic pursuits possibly introducing unreliability in its data and not measuring service quality.
### Financial agency
#### Direct transfers
@Emigh2018 study the effects of direct state transfers to people in poverty in the post-socialist market transition countries of Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria.
It first looks at the correlations of socio-demographic characteristics with poverty to find that in each country there was an increased probability for poverty of low-education, larger and predominantly Roma households.
It also found that poverty itself was most feminized Hungary, the country with the most advanced market transition in the study period, and least feminized in Bulgaria, the country with the least advanced market transition, and suggests that poverty may have feminized as the market transitions progressed.
For the state transfers it found that while the level of payments may have been too small to eliminate longer-term adverse effects of the market transitions,
in each country's case the transfers to individuals reduced their poverty and were beneficial at least in the short term.
The authors thus suggest that their findings may be compatible both with an institutionalist perspective seeing poverty-eliminating benefits in the short term and with an underclass perspective which contends that nonetheless the transfers do not eliminate the deprivations members of disadvantaged groups face, while providing little evidence for generating welfare dependency proposed in a more neoclassical perspective.
However, due to no long-term panel data available to fully analyse the underclass and neoclassical arguments, these findings should not be understood too generalizable.
@Wang2016 undertake an observational study on the levels of social assistance benefits and wages in a national comparative study within 26 developed countries.
It finds that real minimum income benefit levels generally increased in most countries from 1990 to 2009, with only a few countries, mostly in Eastern European welfare states, showing decreases during the time frame.
The majority of changes in real benefit levels are from deliberate policy changes and the study calculates them by a comparison of the changes in benefit levels to the changes in consumer prices.
Secondly, it finds that changes for income replacement rates are more mixed, with rates decreasing even in some countries which have increasing real benefits levels.
The study suggests this is because benefit levels are in most cases not linked to wages and policy changes also do not take changes in wages into account resulting in diverging benefit levels and wages, which may lead to exacerbating inequality gaps between income groups.
An experimental study of providing UBI for villages in India by @Standing2015 looks at the effects on absolute low-income household debts, utilizing a combination of qualitative and quantitative experimental research.
It finds that the provision of UBI significantly reduced household debts, finding generally agreeing with assumptions in the literature, but goes beyond this by investigating the qualitative causes going beyond purely monetary value into what the authors call 'emancipatory value'.
They find UBI reduces dependency risk - primarily to lenders with high associated fees by allowing the repayment of existing debt, not having to work for the lender directly or by providing them parts of their wages, avoiding taking on new debts and, if new debts have to be taken on, allows choosing less exploitative forms of borrowing (such as from relatives or friends).
The last channel especially is a point of interest of the study: the intervention did not just reduce absolute debts through an individual possessing more money, it generally infused more money into the local contexts, reducing its scarcity and allowing others such as neighbors and friends to provide more collective risk spreading in the villages..
The intervention also significantly increased possibility of saving in treatment households, allowing for an increased economic security and empowerment, which was also influenced by houshold head education, landholding, the household's caste and size.
The main channel this is accomplished through is a shift to institutionalized saving, with provides increased resilience against shock events.
@Cieplinski2021 undertake a simulation study on the income inequality effects of both a policy targeting a reduction in working time and the introduction of a UBI in Italy.
It finds that while both decrease overall income inequality, measured through Gini coefficient, they do so through different channels.
While provision of a UBI sustains aggregate demand, thereby spreading income in a more equitable manner,
working time reductions significantly decrease aggregate demand through lower individual income but significantly increases labour force participation and thus employment.
It also finds that through these channels of changing aggregate demand, the environmental outcomes are oppositional, with work time reduction decreasing and UBI increasing the overall ecological footprint.
One limitation of the study is the modeling assumption that workers will have to accept both lower income and lower consumption levels under a policy of work time reduction through stable labour market entry for the results to hold.
#### Microfinance
@Al-Mamun2014 conduct a study on the impacts of an urban micro-finance programme in Malaysia on the economic empowerment of women.
The programme introduced the ability for low-income urban individuals to receive collateral-free credit.
The study finds that the programme, though not specifically aimed at women, indeed increased women's economic empowerment with an increase in household decision-making, as well as increased personal economic security.
Primarily this is due to the increased access to finance, though it also functions thorugh an increase of collective agency established for the women in organised meetings and trainings.
It also finds, however, that the empowerment outcomes are constrained by the inability for individuals to obtain loans, with the programme only disbursing group loans which are harder to achieve through obstacles to collective organisation by different racial and socio-demographic backgrounds in each dwelling.
The study is somewhat limited in its explanatory power since even through its random sampling design it can not establish control for all factors required in experimental design.
In turn, @Field2019 undertake an experimental study looking at the effects of granting women increased access to their own financial accounts and training on their employment and hours worked, as well as more long-term economic empowerment.
The background of the experiment was the rural Indian MGNREGS[^1] programme which, despite ostensibly mandated gender wage parity, runs the risk of discouraging female workers and restricting their agency by depositing earned wages into a single household account --- predominantly owned by the male head of household.
To grant increased financial access, the treatment changed the deposits into newly opened individual accounts for the women workers, as well as providing additional training to some women.
It found that, short-term, the deposits into women's individual accounts in combination with provided training increased their labour supply, while longer-term there was an increased acceptance of female work in affected households and a significant increase in women's hours worked.
The impacts on increased hours worked were concentrated on those households where previously women worked relatively lower amounts and there were stronger norms against female work while less constrained households' impacts dissipated over time.
The authors suggest the primary channel is the newly increased bargaining power through having a greater control of one's income, and that it in turn also reflects onto gender norms themselves.
[^1]: The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, one of the largest redistribution programmes on the household level in the world, entitling each household to up to 100 days of work per year.
# Results for horizontal inequalities