While the potential of carbon pricing to curb CO2 emissions is widely acknowledged, the instrument keeps being disputed due to its potential regressivity and the burden it places on low-income households. Recently also the issue of horizontal inequalities has gained in importance in political...

Population ageing is associated with increasing healthcare expenditure. To guide policy and the adaptation of health systems, however, a more accurate understanding of the quantitative effect of different components of ageing and other factors that influence cost dynamics is needed. This study...

This paper examines the evolving landscape of long-term care (LTC) provision in Austria, Spain, UK and Canada, four countries included in the collaborative research project WellCARE. Its aim is to provide a basis to understand the features and vulnerabilities of different care systems,...

As populations in Asia and Europe face unprecedented levels of ageing, the demand for long-term care (LTC) is escalating, thereby challenging the sustainability of social protection systems. This paper employs a novel dynamic microsimulation model to project LTC demand and supply in Austria and...

This paper describes a novel method for the comparative estimation of long-term care needs, care arrangements and care gaps. Our approach generalizes an Austrian administrative procedure for the assessment of care needs and uses data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe...

Population ageing will reshape economies around the world, with particular implications for longterm care (LTC) systems. As a result of past fertility decline, reflected in high levels of childlessness and smaller family networks, the growing demand for care is confronted by a declining supply...

Europe's demographic shift is putting increasing pressure on long-term care (LTC) systems and raising concerns about the sustainability of LTC financing. This paper analyses Austria's LTC system, particularly its universal long-term care allowance (LTCA), and uses a dynamic microsimulation model...

Many countries have reduced the generosity of disability benefits while making them more activating – yet few studies have examined how employment rates have subsequently changed. We present estimates of how the employment rates of older workers with poor health in 13 high-income countries...

The intense debate on welfare state transformation concerns as much the interpretation of past developments as it does the direction in which European welfare states should evolve in the future. Within this debate, the idea of “social investment” (SI) as a framework to understand and design...

We estimate sickness absences on Mondays and Fridays which fall between a weekend and public holidays, so called "bridging days". Many public holidays change their day of the week over the years. We find that sickness absences are considerably lower on bridging days than on regular Mondays and...