The aim of this paper is twofold. First, to analyze the relationship between the distribution of household income and the distribution of working time in six European countries and in the United States. The second objective is to assess how the tax and transfer systems affect the gender...

In this paper we use microdata on employment and earnings from a variety of industrialized countries to investigate the family gap in pay - the differential in hourly wages between women with children and women without children. We present results from seven countries: Australia, Canada, the...

In an age when there is considerable focus on the needs and rights of children, it is perhaps a little surprising that parental income still mostly determines the standard of living that children enjoy. This has important implications, not just in terms of overall levels of welfare for children,...

The goal of this study is to look at different countries, study their redistribution policies and discuss the effects of the redistribution/incentives tradeoff. Since we want to look at countries that display different degrees of government intervention, we pick countries belonging to both...

This paper provides estimates for male-female earnings differentials in Sweden and Finland, incorporating the use of the Heckman (1979) two-step procedure for sample selection bias. Women who take part in the labor market may be a non-random sub-set of those being able to work. Therefore, the...

Current debates on the welfare state entail two intertwined questions. First, does a nation have sufficient active labor force participation to maintain the benefits for non-participants? Second, do social provisions exacerbate or attenuate class, ethnic and other distinctions within society? As...

Comparative research of poverty, income inequality and the effectiveness of income transfer systems has flourished during the last two decades, largely owing to the contribution of the Luxembourg Income Study project. So far, however, the majority of comparative analyses have been based on a...

Up to the 1990s the development of family policy was an integral part of the success story of the Nordic welfare state. This article aims to evaluate the impact of legislative amendments to family policy at the micro-level in Sweden and Finland during the 1990s. We follow the micro-level...

This paper examines whether retirement-income systems allow older individuals to enjoy socially acceptable income levels independent of paid work (decommodification) and the family (defamilialization). Little research has investigated the degree to which decommodification and defamilialization...

Using data from the mid-1990s from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), we analyze for several household types the effect of mothers' work participation on families' relative income position and poverty risk. Results are compared across seven European countries with contrasting family policies:...