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SUMMARY The growing leniency and generosity of public income support systems has been hypothesized to negatively affect work effort. The magnitude of this effect is estimated for the U. S. and the Netherlands in the 1970s, using a three‐stage Probit‐OLS model employed on micro data sets. Individuals are viewed as choosing the number of hours worked on the basis of expected labor income, expected transfer income, labor market and demographic characteristics and health. The elasticity of annual hours worked with respect to expected transfer income was estimated to be ‐0.22 for U. S. and ‐0.82 (1980) for the Netherlands. Combining these elasticities with the annual percentage increases in transfer generosity yields a yearly reduction in the number of hours worked of 0.65% for the U. S. and 2.7% for the Netherlands during the 1970s. These results suggest that growing transfers have had a substantial and negative impact on desired work effort and thus on production and economic performance, especially in the Netherlands.

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