An opportunity or a disincentive to work? The heterogeneous impact of the Citizenship Income on employment chances: a case study

The Citizenship Income (Reddito di Cittadinanza, RdC) consists of the provision of a monetary subsidy to supplement the income of poor families, conditional on adherence to paths of social and work inclusion. The aim of this article is to present one of the first impact evaluations of the RdC on the employment outcomes of beneficiaries in the Sardinia Region who were in a state of unemployment at the time they began to receive the benefit, between April 2019 and June 2021. The empirical analysis is based on two large databases taken from administrative sources, provided by the Labor and Training Information System. Their integration makes it possible to reconstruct the socio-personal characteristics and the working careers of both the recipients of the RdC and non-beneficiaries who have had at least one contact with the Employment Centers (CPI). The analytical strategy is based on the innovative combination of statistical matching techniques (entropy balancing), binomial logistic regression, survival analysis, and meta-analysis techniques. The results indicate that, overall, having received the RdC reduced the subsequent employment chances almost negligibly for those who were unemployed when they began to receive the economic benefit. However, the heterogeneity analysis suggests that perceiving the RdC contributed to decreasing employment chances for those categories that were in a position of traditional weakness in relation to the labor market in Sardinia and more generally in Italy.