Have recent trends in globalization changed the positive link between trade openness and social insurance? The consensus view - that voters want better social insurance against income loss the more open the economy - is seemingly contested by the rise of populism and the China shock. We present...

This paper studies the effects of a large welfare benefit reduction on the children in the affected families. The welfare cut targeted adult refugees who received residency in Denmark, and it reduced their disposable income by 30 percent on average over the first five years. We show that...

This paper assesses the existence and the extent of austerity‐oriented policies in Germany in the aftermath of the 2008‐9 recession. In contrast to the intensive phase of labour market and welfare state reforms in the early 2000s aimed at 'welfare readjustment', we do not see austerity...

Most conceptualisations of the bottom billion assume that "the poor" are a minority group in a state of continuous dependency, identifiable by region and demographic. Using a flow analysis (inflow and outflow) of poverty, rather than a stock analysis, we explain why poverty is more appropriately...

How do labour market policies influence employment's responsiveness to output fluctuations (employment-output elasticity)? We revisit this question on a panel of OECD countries, which also incorporates the period of the Great Recession. We distinguish between passive and active labour market...

Modern welfare policies are increasingly based on notions of reciprocity. Citizens on welfare benefits have to do something in return, e.g. volunteer work. Notwithstanding general public support, social philosophers have been critical on 'mandatory' activities in community programmes. So far,...

Redistribution across individuals in a one-year-period framework is an empirically intensely studied question. However, a substantial share of annual redistribution might turn out to serve individual insurance in a longer perspective, reducing the level of actual redistribution across...

The majority of the Member States of the European Union have undertaken remarkably comprehensive welfare and labor market reforms in the years since the 1990s. Many of these reforms, however, have not followed the conventional retrenchment and deregulation recipes, but rather took a liking to...