The Transformation of Canadian Social Assistance and its Consequences for Work, Health, and Children's Prosperity

Social Assistance in Canada has changed remarkably since the early 1990s. In this talk, Dr. Hicks will provide an overview of these changes across the provinces and then present research studying how this transformation affected work behaviour, health, and children's long-run prosperity.

Speaker

Jeffrey Hicks is a Social Science and Humanities Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto. He is an applied microeconomist primarily studying the design and implementation of government safety net programs. His research agenda primarily focuses on the design and implementation of taxation and social insurance systems. His current projects use a range of data sources including large-scale linked administrative datasets, web-scraped textual data, and spatial information.

The Tax Law and Policy Speaker Series at Allard Law is an academic, interdisciplinary forum for disseminating research on tax law and policy. In past years, the series has featured many leading scholars of tax law and policy from Canada and the rest of the world. The series is often (though not exclusively) held in conjunction with a Tax Policy seminar course offered to UBC law students. Many sessions are open to the public.