In 1997, the Treaty of Amsterdam included the gender component in all European Community policies, establishing that the principle of equal treatment is a fundamental right. Since then, Member States formulated and promoted various policies and measures to combat inequalities. On the other hand,...

Early childhood investment is of major importance in human and social capital theory, but can be a relevant issue even in policy making since there is evidence that an equity-efficiency trade-off does not exist for investments in very young people. Our analysis compares governments’ policies...

Since the 1990s, dramatic changes in German family policy have occurred and legislators have increasingly placed more distance between themselves and the traditional male-breadwinner model through the introduction of new laws in the domain of parental leave and child care provision. France, for...

We draw lessons from existing work and our own analysis on the effects of parental leave and other interventions aimed at aiding families. The outcomes of interest are female employment, gender gaps in earnings and fertility. We begin with a discussion of the historical introduction of family...

European fascist regimes have attached great importance to nationalistic families and designed policies to perpetuate them. Most offered policy packages with interest-free loans repayable through childbirth, along with allowances and tax deductions for large families. Using a...

In this paper, we estimate the impacts of local-government-sponsored pronatal policies on fertility by exploiting the geographical variation in policies across municipalities in Japan. We develop an empirical model that accommodates both the location and fertility choices of households to take...

The employment rate of women is twice as high in Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian countries compared to Mediterranean ones while this gap is close to zero for men. This phenomenon is generally explained by institutions such as labor market and family policies. In this paper it is argued that the...

The aim of this paper is to analyse the effectivity of family policies in the context of different assumptions regarding the social structure of a society. We use an agent based simulation model to analyse the impact of family policies on individual fertility decisions and on cohort fertility,...