The goal of the welfare state is the redistribution of income in order to reduce poverty and reduce inequality. Income inequality and relative poverty are often cited as major policy concerns, and are tracked by economists. Economists and policy makers also value measures of absolute poverty as...

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 the effect of public assistance, labor market and marriage market conditions on the prevalence of single mother families across countries and over time. A multinomial logit derived from a random utility approach is estimated using individual level data for 14 countries. I...

This article investigates the dual-earner model in families with children in Finland and Sweden from the end of the 1980s to the beginning of the 2000s. During this period the two countries introduced the same kind as well as different kinds of policies in relation to the dual-earner model....