What institutional configurations influence fertility patterns across countries? While family policies feature prominently in previous explanations, this article highlights the importance of housing in shaping family formation decisions. Housing costs, determined by state and market factors,...

Across OECD countries there are large differences in the average level and trend of working hours and there is persuasive evidence that attitudes to paid employment, particularly for women, differ significantly. This paper therefore asks the question: 'How much of the difference between...

This paper focuses on the differences in earnings and labor force status of low-skilled prime age men in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States at the end of the 20th century, and their relation to the differences in wage dispersion. In the UK and the US, where the bottom of the wage...

This paper examines whether retirement-income systems allow older individuals to enjoy socially acceptable income levels independent of paid work (decommodification) and the family (defamilialization). Little research has investigated the degree to which decommodification and defamilialization...

Using data from the mid-1990s from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), we analyze for several household types the effect of mothers' work participation on families' relative income position and poverty risk. Results are compared across seven European countries with contrasting family policies:...

This paper examines gender differentials in the resources of households and individuals across seven welfare states. In its first part, it asks whether female-headed households can secure a living income without recourse to either the state or the income of a male partner. It then steps inside...

The recent debate on trends in inequality in industrial countries has been marred by the lack of consensus about the relevant concept of inequality. Labour economists are concerned with inequality in earnings, macroeconomists with movements in the wage share, while policy-makers tend to focus on...

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...

The cohort sustainability of welfare regimes is of central importance to most long-term analyses of welfare state reforms (see for example: Esping-Andersen et al., 2002). A complement to these analyses shows that changes in intra versus inter cohort inequalities are major outcomes or...

Past literature on the family gap - the difference in outcomes for mothers and women without children - discusses inequality in wages and employment. This study examines family gaps in the economic well-being of households, and analyzes the extent to which they are reduced by the availability of...