We present evidence from a randomized Öeld experiment explictly designed to shed light on the role of standard information, goal framed information, and decision task complexity in individualsí choice of payment method. The experiment encouraged 19,707 Clients of the Belgian National O¢ ce...

Currently, the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) is the single most important data source for cross-national comparative research on income and living conditions in the European Union. As EU-SILC consists of a sample of European households, point estimates...

Under the social investment paradigm, a child-centred investment strategy has been developed. Mainstay of such strategy is the provision of childcare services, which are expected to increase maternal employment rates, further children’s human capital and mitigate social inequalities in early...

This paper is prepared as a chapter for the Handbook of Income Distribution, Volume 2 (edited by A. B. Atkinson and F. Bourguignon, Elsevier-North Holland, forthcoming). Like the other chapters in the volume (and its predecessor), the aim is to provide a comprehensive review of a particular area...

The EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) are the principal data source for analysing the social situation in Europe. Given that EU-SILC is based on a representative sample in each participating country, estimates based on EU-SILC are subject to sampling variance. One of the...

This paper revisits social policy developments in Belgium in the decade 2000-2010 on the basis of stylized facts with regard to spending, employment, the social policy caseload, dependency rates and poverty. With regard to spending it focuses on the long-term evolution in Belgian public social...

During the past two decades, a large body of research focused on the family stress model that examined family-based pathways through which financial stress is associated with negative child outcome. These studies have shown that through elevated levels of parental and interparental distress,...

In the microsimulation literature, it is still uncommon to test the statistical significance of results. In this note we argue that this situation is both undesirable and unnecessary. Provided the parameters used in the microsimulation are exogenous, as is often the case in static...

This paper uses data from the EU Survey of Income and Living Conditions 2005-2010 to examine the relationship between incomes and people’s living arrangements, both at the aggregate level (that is, how living arrangements vary with GDP) and at the level of individual behaviour, within...

European welfare states are under considerable stress. On the one hand, the recession has caused unemployment to rise and household incomes to fall, which both raise the demand for social protection. On the other hand, austerity policies and programme reforms affect the capacity of welfare...