The analysis provides a new explanation for two widespread problems concerning European unemployment policy: the disappointingly small effect of many past reform measures on unemployment, and the political difficulties in implementing more extensive reform programs. We argue that the heart of...

The fallout from the global economic downturn of 2008-09 is a continuing source of stress on families and a constraint on government policies. How can social policies contribute to a quick and equitable recovery from the crisis and how can they best respond to the difficulties that households...

This paper presents a model allowing to analyze voting, welfare institutions and economic performance. We consider a political economy framework with three classes of agents: entrepreneurs, employed workers and unemployed workers. Agents vote on alternative institutional options: the degree of...

We explore the far-reaching implications of replacing current unemployment benefit (UB) systems by an unemployment accounts (UA) system. Under the UA system, employed people are required to make ongoing contributions to their UAs and the balances in these accounts are available to them during...

The objective of this paper is to examine the extent to which an individual’s use of unemployment insurance (UI) as a young adult is influenced by past experience with the program, and by having had a parent who also collected UI. A major methodological challenge is to determine the extent to...

Survey data from urban China in 2002 show levels of life satisfaction to be low, but not exceptionally so, by international comparison. Many of the determinants of life satisfaction in urban China appear comparable to those for people in other countries. These include, inter alia, unemployment,...

We study the development of teenage fertility in East and West Germany using data from the German Socioeconomic Panel (SOEP) and from the German Mikrozensus. Following the international literature we derive hypotheses on the patterns of teenage fertility and test whether they are relevant in the...

Family size is the outcome of sequential decisions influenced both by preferences and by ongoing changes in the environment where a family lives. During the last two decades the gap between the number of children women prefer and their actual fertility has widened in Spain. The paper uses the...

We explore the relation between fertility and the business cycle in Latin American countries taking advantage of the existing cross-country and within-country differences in both fertility and macroeconomic conditions. First, we use a panel of 18 nations for over 45 years to study how different...

In this paper we investigate how fertility decisions respond to unexpected career interruptions which occur as a consequence of job displacement. Using an event study approach we compare the birth rates of displaced women with those of women unaffected by job loss after establishing the...