Supporting working mothers to balance their work and childcare responsibilities is a central objective of maternal and parental leave policies. Nearly all countries offer some forms of maternity and family leave programs for childbearing on a national basis. This chapter reviews various types of...

Having faced high unemployment rates for more than a decade, the German government implemented a comprehensive set of labour market reforms during the period 2003-2005. This paper describes the economic and institutional context of the German labour market before and after these so-called Hartz...

While high rates of youth unemployment are a severe problem in most European countries, the program evaluation literature shows that di sadvantaged youths constitute a group that is particularly difficult to assist effectively. As innovative measures are thus needed, we evaluate a German pilot...

Welfare reform has transformed the U.S. cash assistance program for single parents and their children. Although there remains substantial uncertainty about the importance of reform in producing the subsequent decline in the welfare caseload, even less is known about its impact on the experiences...

Recent welfare reforms are prompting some state and local welfare agencies to use temporary help service firms to help place welfare recipients into jobs. Concerns have arisen that these jobs are more likely to pay low wages, provide fewer benefits, and offer less stability. We explore the...

This paper presents a new data set collected on representative samples across 6 countries: China, South Korea, Japan, Italy, the UK and the four largest states in the US. The information collected relates to work and living situations, income, behavior (such as social-distancing, hand-washing...