Existing research on family and well-being has generally focused on the traditional family, and has largely ignored the increasing diversity in family forms and relations. Our aim in this paper is to help fill this gap by investigating the extent of the relationship between living arrangements...

Childbearing within cohabitation has gained considerable ground in recent decades, but existing explanations for this development are not coherent. Proponents of the Second Demographic Transition framework interpret it rather as a pattern of progress driven by processes such as emancipation from...

A large number of empirical studies have investigated the role of education in the changes in union dissolution in Europe, but these studies have so far produced inconsistent results. This paper seeks to assess the relationship between educational attainment and the incidence of marital...

The aim of the paper is to provide insights into how religion influences the family formation process. In particular, we analyze the impact of a neighborhood context religiosity on an individual decision to enter cohabitation. We use the data on two European societies where secularization and...

A new generation of studies has called into question standard microeconomic predictions of a positive association between women’s economic independence and union dissolution, and suggests that it is necessary to include information about both partners’ contributions to paid and unpaid work...

Home-ownership is the most important asset among the elderly in Europe, but in this domain very little is known about gender differences. This paper aims at exploring the link between gender, living arrangements, monetary poverty and home tenure among older Europeans, in order to identify the...

On the social landscape of the high-middle-income countries, unmarried cohabitation has become an increasingly popular living arrangement over the last decades. Several observers have noted a “cohabitation gap” in the satisfaction assessment of partners, with cohabitors being less satisfied...

In this paper we compare Italy and Poland, two countries where the country-specific obstacles to work and family reconciliation are similarly strong, but which differ in terms of the history of women’s labour force participation and of household living standards. We adopt a life course...