Does postpartum depression predict emotional and cognitive difficulties in 11 year olds?

[…] not show any correlation with PPD Cognitive ability tests show no association between PPD and children’s cognitive performance at age 11. The results of the paper have enhanced our insight regarding a significant period of transition which has not previously been the focus of research and demonstrate the impact PPD has on children’s emotional development.

The sad truth about happiness scales: empirical results

[…] results from the happiness literature: the Easterlin Paradox, the ‘U-shaped’ relation between happiness and age, the happiness trade-off between inflation and unemployment, cross-country comparisons of happiness, the impact of the Moving to Opportunity program on happiness, the impact of marriage and children on happiness, the ‘paradox’ of declining female happiness, and the effect of […]

Knocking on parents’ doors: regulation and intergenerational mobility

We exploited two major reforms in the regulation of professional services implemented in Italy since the 2000s in order to examine the impact on the intergenerational transmission of occupations. We built an OECD-style indicator of strictness of regulation for 14 occupations and three different cohorts (i.e. before and after each reform). Then, using a […]

Europe through the crisis: discretionary policy changes and automatic stabilisers

Tax-benefit policies affect household incomes through two main channels: discretionary policy changes and automatic stabilisers. Although a large body of literature has studied the impact of tax-benefit policy changes on incomes, little is known about the link between automatic stabilisers and the income distribution. We contribute to the literature by studying in detail the […]

Research note: The distributional impact of local social benefits in Croatia

The aim of this research note is to analyse the distributional impact of five types of local social benefits (compensation for housing costs, old-age income supplement, grant for a newborn child, kindergarten subsidy and city transport subsidy) in the four major Croatian cities – Zagreb, Split, Rijeka and Osijek – which is a first […]

The long-term labor market effects of parental unemployment

I investigate the long-run impact of parental job loss around important decision milestones on children’s long-run labor market outcome. Using the early tracking of children in the Austrian school system at age 10 to define such a milestone, I compare labor market outcomes until the age of 37 of children whose parents had an […]

Progressive tax reforms in flat tax countries

[…] some progressivity in the tax system has come to the fore in both policy and academic circles. In this paper, we analyse the fiscal, redistributive and macroeconomic impact of (re-)introducing progressivity in a number of CEE countries with flat tax systems. Combining microsimulation and macro models, we find that a significant reduction in income […]

Universal family background effects on education across and within societies

The extent to which siblings resemble each other measures the total impact of family background in shaping life outcomes. We study sibling similarity in cognitive skills, school grades, and educational attainment in Finland, Germany, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We also compare sibling similarity by parental education and occupation within […]