New Labour has placed great faith in active labour market policies to address problems of long-term unemployment and poverty. This paper considers the effectiveness of welfare-to-work programmes in light of persistent regional employment disparities within the UK. It is argued that the...

Poverty has been ongoing for many years and still continues to exist in almost all countries around the globe. The objective of alleviating poverty in many nations therefore, remains a significant issue. To comprehend the risks posed by the issue of poverty, its dimension and the process by...

Lea Immel prepared this study while she was working at the Research Group Taxation and Fiscal Policy at the ifo Institute. The study was completed in September 2020 and accepted as doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It consists of four distinct empirical...

Which of Germanys regions is the most attractive? Where is it best to live and work - on objective grounds? These questions are summed up in the concept "quality of life". This paper uses recent research projects that determine this parameter to examine the spatial distribution of quality of...

The questions addressed in this paper are: (i) does wage inequality increase with local population size, and if so, (ii) what are possible factors behind this increase? In a cross-section analysis of Swedish local labour markets using unique full population data, the article shows that urban...

Are developing-world cities engines of opportunities for low-wage earners? In this study, we track a cohort of young low-income workers in Brazil for thirteen years to explore the contribution of factors such as industrial structure and skill segregation on upward income mobility. We find that...

There are interesting differences in self-employment rates among countries and also among regions within the same country. There is a multiplicity of reasons to explain the evolution of self-employment and the differences among countries and/or regions. However, unemployment and the distribution...

Since 2008, Poland has been among the EU countries that have increased their minimum wage levels the most, following period in the mid-2000s during which the country's minimum wage was barely raised. We evaluate the impact of these minimum wage hikes on employment and wage growth in Poland...