In this paper, we examine the role of the business cycle in divorce. To do so, we use a panel of 30 European countries covering the period from 1991 to 2010. We find a negative effect of the unemployment rate on the divorce rate, pointing to a pro-cyclical evolution of the divorce rate, even...

Economic growth and unemployment exhibit an ambiguous relationship – according to empirical studies. This ambiguity can be investigated by observing the role of the underground economy in shaping the productivity of firms. Indeed, unemployment may be absorbed by underground firms, which adopt...

The findings of the existing literature on the relationship between employment protection legislation and the unemployment rate are mixed. This study analyzes the relationship between employment protection legislation measured by the OECD Employment Protection Index and the unemployment rate...

How does inequality motivate people and at what cost? We develop a model of perpetual youth with heterogeneous upward-looking aspirations -- people value their consumption relative to the conditional mean of those above them in the distribution. Their survival depends on health capital produced...

The relation of the Greek employment policy to the European one, as it was formulated within EES and the Lisbon strategy, was a particular one. The Greek employment policy fully adopted the form, the structure and the discourse of the EES but it was only marginally influenced by the “way of...

Foreign aid has evolved considerably over the last five decades in response to a dramatically changing global political and economic context. This paper takes a retrospective look at this process and discusses whether aid has been effective in furthering economic growth and development. The...

Citizens of Southern Europe have been presented by the German media and politicians as lazy and work aversive. First, it is checked whether and to what extent those characterizations do reflect reality, and then, in view of the Greek economic crisis, it is shown that crises and not laziness...

This paper explores how a trust in government shared by neighbors is associated with individual preferences for income redistribution and individual perceptions regarding income tax burden. Three measures for trust in government are used: “trust in ministries and government agencies”,...

This paper analyzes recent labor market developments in the Chilean economy. The evidence shows a booming labor market with strong job creation since 2010. Most of the jobs created during the past three years are quality jobs—that is, jobs with a written contract and whose employers have made...

I maintain that fatalistic tendencies are the output of the interaction between cultural factors (and in particular of religious beliefs) and historical Institutional experience. Using WVS data this idea has been tested against two well known sociological theories on the origin of fatalism:...