Having a child out of wedlock used to be associated with shame and scorn. This is mostly not the case any more in the western world. Therefore, freed from social sanctions, single motherhood has become an additional family-choice alternative for women, along with marriage and childlessness. Yet,...

Are American workers less likely to observe a religious holiday now than they were 30 years ago? In this paper I use evidence from religious holidays to explore the evolution of market hours' flexibility and religious observance during the last thirty years. To do so, I take advantage of three...

In Deutschland werden die Geburtskohorten der 1956 bis 1965 Geborenen als Babyboomer bezeichnet. Diese Gruppe kennzeichnet sich nicht nur durch eine überdurchschnittliche Kohortenstärke aus, sondern diese waren Profiteure des Ausbaus des Wohlfahrtsstaates und deren Kindheit und Jugend: waren...

This collection of short essays proceeds from an international conference organized by DIIS on 9th November 2009, the day of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The volume centers on the political, social, and economic implications of the revolutions of 1989 on European...

Mit diesem Beitrag wird das Ziel verfolgt, Stabilität und Wandel der Beziehungen zwischen erwachsenen Kindern und Eltern von 1991 bis 1996 zu untersuchen, die nicht mehr im selben Haushalt leben. Dabei wird insbesondere zwischen ostdeutschen und westdeutschen Generationenbeziehungen...

Recent research postulating that the diffusion of confidential access to the birth control pill to young women in the United States contributed to the dramatic social changes of the late 1960s and 1970s has not adequately accounted for the largely contemporaneous diffusion of access to abortion....

The proliferation of social organizations in China has engendered a lively debate about how to conceptualize these social forces. This paper argues that such a conceptualization should take into account the role that both the party-state and social actors attribute to social organizations. With...

Poverty reduction initiatives should be comprehensive, relational and global in their outlook even though poverty itself is always concrete and experienced in the local context. This is the major idea underlying this DIIS Report. The Report provides a brief overview of contemporary work on...

In this paper we will discuss how the value placed on increasing ‘choice’ is a major factor determining both childcare and elder care policies, focussing in particular on the increasing emphasis on using cash allowances and tax credits or reliefs to achieve greater diversity of provision and...

Conventional R&D-based growth theory suggests that productivity growth is positively correlated with population size or population growth, an implication which is hard to see in the data. Here we integrate microfounded fertility and schooling into an otherwise standard R&D-based growth model. We...