Public Assistance Reform and Consumption:

Empirical Investigations on the 2013 Reform in Japan

Abstract

We examine the effects of the 2013 public assitance reform on household consumption. To do this, we used the microdata on the Comprehensive Survey of Living Conditions, which we procured by the 33rd article of the Statistics Act. First, we confirmed the causal effects showing that recipient households reduced consumption after the 2013 reform by PSM-DID estimation. Second, using quantile regression, while we demonstrated that most recipient households reduced consumption, the effects on households with higher and lower consumption level were not estimated to be statistically sigfinicant.