The institution of marriage has served to funnel economic resources from fathers to children. Its continued decline in the countries of the developed world threatens the adequacy of the economic support of human reproduction, now increasingly provided by women. Its decline is also probably...

In this paper, we test empirically for strategic behaviour among the states using the cash support program Aid to Families with Dependant Children (AFDC). To motivate the empirical work, we adept Wildasin´s [41] model of income redistribution to a model of "interjurisdictional welfare...

In most rich democracies one finds a tendency for the share in public finance that is available for discretionary spending to shrink. This is because tax revenues do not keep pace with simultaneous increases in fixed expenditures and growing pressures for fiscal consolidation. The present paper...

While the immigration policy in the United States is mainly oriented to family reunification, in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom. it is a points-based immigration system which main objective is to attract high skilled immigrants. This paper compares both immigration policies through the...

The objective of this paper is to distinguish between different types of working poverty, on the basis of the mechanisms that produce it. Whereas the poverty literature identifies a myriad of risk factors and of categories of disadvantaged workers, we focus on three immediate causes of working...

The paper consists of three parts. The first part presents empirical results on the economic situation among Japanese households with children. The second part compares and analyzes cross-national micro-data on households with children. And, lastly, I discuss attitudes toward child-rearing...

Children do not control their socio-economic situation; they benefit or suffer from their parents' situation. In north European countries major social transfer schemes, depending on the presence of dependent children, answer to multiple objectives (birth rate support, reduced inequality in the...

Utilizing data from the June Current Population Survey (CPS) Fertility Supplement merged with data from other months of the CPS, we describe trends in parents' employment and leave-taking after birth of a newborn and analyze the extent to which these behaviors are associated with parental leave...

This paper examines how the public policy environment in the United States affects work by new mothers following childbirth. We examine four types of policies that vary across states and affect the budget constraint in different ways. The policy environment has important effects, particularly...