We use cross-national data on 26 EU countries to assess how much children and the responsibilities related to them contribute to the gender wage gap, and how institutional elements - especially family policies - affect this relationship. Our analysis is based on a decomposition that reveals what...

This paper investigates the impact of unemployment on the propensity to start a family. Unemployment is accompanied by bad occupational prospects and impending economic deprivation, placing the well-being of a future family at risk. I analyze unemployment at the intersection of state-dependence...

While several social, economic and financial indicators point to a growing convergence among European countries, striking differences still emerge in the timing of leaving home for adult children. In Southern countries (as Spain, Italy or Portugal) in 2001 more than 70 percent of young adults...

This paper maps key indicators of household structure across all countries for all countries of the expanded European Union except Malta. As well as presenting statistics which take the entire household as the unit of analysis, we also focus on groups which are particularly interesting in terms...

In the EU there is growing concern about poverty among children, and among families with children. In most OECD countries, income poverty among children now exceeds that among the elderly, who traditionally were the demographic group most at risk of poverty (Jäntti and Danziger, 2000). However,...