In Europe differences among countries in the overall change in happiness since the early 1980s have been due chiefly to the generosity of welfare state programs - increasing happiness going with increasing generosity and declining happiness with declining generosity. This is the principal...

Despite the EU emphasis on the 1995 Barcelona process, trade integration with the Mediterranean (MED) countries is still underdeveloped. To contrast the success of EU integration with MED countries and that with the new EU members, we compute the trade potential of these EU partners from 1995 to...

This paper tests the differential effects of the generosity of the welfare state under free migration and under policy-controlled migration, distinguishing between source developing and developed countries. We utilize free-movement within the EU to examine the free migration regime and compare...

We investigate the direct and long-run effects of fertility on employment in Europe estimating dynamic models of labor supply under different assumptions regarding the exogeneity of fertility and modeling assumptions related to initial conditions, unobserved heterogeneity and serial correlation...

OECD countries faced largely divergent employment rates during the last decades. But the whole bulk of the cross-national and cross-temporal heterogeneity relies on specific demographic groups: prime-age women and younger and older individuals. This paper argues that family labor supply...

We suggest a political economy explanation for the stylized fact that intragenerationally more redistributive social security systems are smaller. We relate the stylized fact to an "efficiency-redistribution" trade-off to be resolved by political process. The inefficiency of social security...

The age at which children leave the parental home differs considerably across countries. In this paper we argue that lower job insecurity of parents and higher job insecurity of children delay emancipation. We provide aggregate evidence which supports this hypothesis for 12 European countries...

The enlargement of the European Union has increased concerns about the role of generous welfare transfers in attracting migrants. This paper explores the issue of welfare migration across the 15 countries of the pre-enlargement Union and finds a significant but small effect of the generosity of...