Energy poverty, long considered a problem limited to developing countries only, is now widely acknowledged as a challenge for advanced OECD countries as well. How energy poverty is perceived depends on the conceptualization and assessment of the underlying phenomena: inappropriately high costs...

Fuel poverty may become an increasingly severe problem in developed countries in cases when real prices for fossil fuels increase at high rates or when real energy prices increase due to policies for greenhouse gas abatement. Fuel poverty measurement consists of two largely independent parts,...

Measures of affordability are applied in practice, e.g., to assess the affordability of energy services, water or housing. They can be interpreted as measures of deprivation in a specific domain of consumption. The large body of literature on affordability measure has little overlap with the...

This paper evaluates the linkage between social security strategies and redistributive effects in EU social transfer systems. It is argued that the various European systems produce different patterns of redistribution that may be explained by the adoption of different mixes of social security...

This paper analyses the distributive impacts of various regulatory and institutional settings of European schemes of social assistance. For this purpose, two sets of classifications of European schemes of social assistance are introduced that classify the systems according to regulatory...

In this paper, the relationship between the degree of centralisation and the distributive outcomes in European schemes of social assistance is investigated. For this purpose, a scheme of classification suitable for grouping the EU15 schemes except for Luxembourg according to features related to...

We estimate the effects of the reform of the German Unemployment Insurance that replaced the wage related Unemployment Assistance with an income maintenance program and stronger means testing. We model the tax-benefit system and use the Socio-Economic Panel. We estimate a discrete labour supply...

Many children grow up with parents working abroad. Economists are interested in the achievement and well-being of these home alone children to better understand the positive and negative aspects of migration in the sending countries. This paper examines the causal effects of parents' migration...

Numerous studies have evaluated the effect of nutrition early in life on health much later in life by comparing individuals born during a famine to others. Nutritional intake is typically unobserved and endogenous, whereas famines arguably provide exogenous variation in the provision of...

This paper examines the impact of parental investments on the development of cognitive, mental and emotional skills during childhood using data from a longitudinal study, the Mannheim Study of Children at Risk, starting at birth. Our work offers three important innovations. First, we use...