The recent EU expansion raised fears of potential migration motivated by welfare receipt. In this paper we use comparable data from five countries - Sweden, Belgium, Germany, Norway and the U.S. - to ask whether immigrants benefit more from social support than natives. Looking at the European...

This paper uses data from the Luxembourg Income Study to analyse cross-national and cross-temporal poverty risks in eleven western countries. Our analyses are embedded in the tradition of welfare state research. Despite a hundred years of welfare state efforts, at the beginning of the 21st...

One of the most frequently expressed concerns about the unprecedented economic boom that Ireland experienced in the second half of the 1990s has been that the benefits were not shared evenly, that rising living standards were accompanied by widening gaps leaving Ireland with a particularly...

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, to analyze the relationship between the distribution of household income and the distribution of working time in six European countries and in the United States. The second objective is to assess how the tax and transfer systems affect the gender...

The pool of early retirees is characterized by a large heterogeneity along several criteria. The present paper focuses on the key distinction between those in forced early retirement and those who retire early by individual choice. We start by estimating a retirement probit model for older...

International comparisons of inequality based on measures of disposable income may not be valid if the size and incidence of publicly-provided in kind benefits differ across the countries considered. The benefits that are financed by taxation in one country may need to be purchased out of...

The paper analyzes the link between old-age income programs and economic outcomes in Belgium. We use a simulation methodology to construct an average pension generosity variable. Our regression analysis explores the link with distributional outcomes in income, consumption and more subjective...

This paper posits that the provision of family friendly practices is, on balance, costly to firms and valuable to workers. As a consequence, we anticipate the emergence of a hedonic equilibrium in which workers provided with such practices face an implicit reduction in their earnings. Using...

This paper relates Amartya Sen’s capability approach to the literature on equivalence scales. Synthetic indicators of well-being are constructed by adjusting individual incomes for differences in functionings. An exploratory comparative application to Italian and Belgian data illustrates the...