This report collects and draws conclusions from research papers of Area 1. It summarises the results against the background of the existing literature, focusing in particular on the challenges arising on welfare states from globalisation, post-industrialisation, and demographic changes. The...

Which impact does government size have on life satisfaction, and how do effects of bigger government differ between income groups in society? Previous studies typically employed country averages and thus neglect possibly heterogeneous happiness effects between income groups. The paper addresses...

We address empirically trust as a determinant of support for government intervention. The central notion provided in the present paper is that the influence of generalized social trust on intervention attitudes is conditional on the perceived reliability, honesty, and incorruptibility of state...

This paper addresses empirically determinants of individual support for the Welfare State. We examine the interrelation of informal institutions with the perceived quality of a country's institutional framework. As a proxy for informal institutions, we concentrate on three core beliefs (trust in...

Long-term beneficial welfare state reforms not only face opposition from powerful insiders and beneficiaries of the system in place. While potential losers from a policy change are often relatively easy to spot, ewll-designed reforms generate mostly diffuse gains, and the potential winners are...

Based on questionnaires conducted among PES organizations as well as Pacts and LEIs (Pacts/LEIs) in 40 cities of 12 EU member states and 2 non-EU member states – we take stock of the preconditions for conducting local labour market policies in an urban context in Europe and analyse the...

We conduct a theoretically based, empirical analysis of the impact of national wage bargaining, labour market and housing market institutions as well as product market regulation on regional unemployment rate disparities. Using both national and regional data on unemployment rates for 14 EU...

We investigate the relative contributions of migrant and native households to welfare states. Using two step Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions that control for selection into benet take-up, we are able to identify the individual variables contributing to dierences in welfare receipt by native and...

We analyse the role of ethnic networks, segregation and diversity of a region on migrants’ success in integration into the host countries’ labour markets. We find a robust negative impact of ethnic networks on unemployment probabilities of the foreign born and a positive one on employment...