Losing a partner is a life-changing experience. We draw on numerous datasets to examine differences between widowed and partnered older women and to provide a comprehensive picture of well-being in widowhood. Most importantly, our analysis accounts for time use in widowhood, an aspect which has...

By age 77 a plurality of women in wealthy Western societies are widows. Comparing older (aged 70+) married women to widows in the American Time Use Survey 2003-18 and linking the data to the Current Population Survey allow inferring the short- and longer-term effects of an arguably exogenous...

Homeownership has been shown to be related to various aspects of well-being, although both the causal nature of this relationship and the possible channels behind it have been difficult to identify. We focus on one of the most often quoted mechanisms which could be responsible for the positive...

We examine long-term implications of unemployment for material conditions and well-being using the Polish sample from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). Retrospective data from the SHARELIFE survey are used to reconstruct labour market experiences across the threshold...

The decisions of parents following the birth of their first child concerning subsequent fertility, and the stability of their relationship can be used as a reflection of broader gender preferences. We study these decisions to identify gender preferences in six Central and Eastern European...

The Polish tax and benefit system is presented in the context of a recently developed microsimulation model, SIMPL. The model allows simulating direct taxes, social contributions and public benefits in Poland for the years 2003 and 2005. It is based on the Household Budgets Survey data (Badania...

Many aspects of the economic transition which started in 1989 in Poland are by now complete. However, the route Polish governments have so far taken concerning the system of support for low-income families still implies very different poverty alleviation schemes compared to those found in many...

In 2007 and 2008 Polish governments introduced a series of reforms which led to a substantial reduction in the tax wedge (in Polish: klin) on labour. We show that when considered together the package of introduced reforms brought much greater reductions in the tax burden compared to a widely...

There is by now a vast number of studies which document a sharp increase in cross-sectional wage inequality during the 2000s. It is often assumed that this inequality is of a permanent nature which in turn is used as an argument calling for government intervention. We examine these claims using...

The aggregate average wage is often used as an indicator of economic performance and welfare, and as such often serves as a benchmark for changes in the generosity of public transfers and for wage negotiations. Yet if economies experience a high degree of (nonrandom) fluctuation in employment...