Social safety nets protect citizens against hardship. By offering compensation, social safety nets may help overcome the political resistance to trade liberalisation and structural reform, but they can also weaken the incentives to work and save. Depending on their design, safety nets may also...

In the vast majority of OECD economies, house prices in real terms have been moving up strongly since the mid-1990s. Because of the important role housing wealth has been playing during the current upswing, this paper will look more closely at what is underlying these developments for 18 OECD...