Papers

Tax-beneft systems play a crucial role in supporting families by providing cash assistance for childrearing. This support helps cover the costs associated with raising children while also contributing to income redistribution. In this paper, we examine the redistributive efects of child-contingent cash support in Spain, a country marked by high child poverty, high income inequality, and low fertility rates. Our study covers nearly two decades of profound socioeconomic changes (2005–2022). We focus on the redistributive efects of child-contingent payments, including both benefts and tax reliefs tied to having children. Our fndings indicate that child-contingent benefts, rather than tax reliefs, are the primary drivers of income redistribution to households with children. While these benefts are generally highly targeted, their low average transfer rates limit their redistributive impact. We show that changes in redistribution result not only from discretionary policy adjustments in child-contingent payments but also from their automatic response to shifts in the socioeconomic characteristics of the population.

The Foster-Greer-Thorbecke class of indices and the TIP curve have become classical tools to measure poverty. In this paper we adapt these indices and curve to the income mobility literature and measure downward income mobility considering its three dimensions of incidence, intensity, and inequality. This strategy allows us to incorporate reference dependence, loss aversion and diminishing sensitivity, features emphasized as welfare determinants in Prospect Theory. We propose the use of a class of measures and a Three I’s of Downward Mobility curve as a useful graphical device in the income growth framework. Based on this curve we can evaluate the degree of regressivity (or progressivity) of income losses. We provide an empirical illustration for Spain in two recent recession periods. Results show that even if for most households the pandemic shock was not as severe as the Great Recession, some sociodemographic groups had a more similar downward mobility experience in both crises. 

We conduct a randomized experiment (n = 600) to evaluate a Supported Employment (SE) program that, through intensive job coaching and follow-along support, aims to increase work activity of Belgian Disability Insurance (DI) recipients with mental health conditions. The control group gets regular vocational rehabilitation. After a 30-month follow-up period, we find that SE increases the probability of working while claiming DI by 7.5 percentage points and reduces the amount of DI benefit received by 110 euros per month (−9.5 percent).

The incorporation of women into the Spanish labor market in recent decades has been a historic milestone. Although significant progress has been made in labor participation and employment, gender labor inequalities persist. This study examines the achievements and challenges faced by women in the labor market. Our research focuses on the analysis of occupational segregation, the gender wage gap, and double segregation in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Additionally, economic and social policy recommendations are proposed to reduce these gaps and address future labor challenges. Despite women's progress in the workforce, much remains to be done to achieve true gender equality in the workplace. Ultimately, this research expands knowledge about the dynamics of the female labor market.

Education acts as a crucial engine for economic growth. However, in Chile, a country highly susceptible to earthquakes, these natural hazards threaten to undermine the benefits of an educated population. Given the limited research in this area, this article contributes by analyzing the short-, medium-, and long-term effects of one of the major earthquakes that struck Chile in 2010 on attendance rates across all educational levels. The study employs a robust identification strategy that integrates earthquake intensity measures with residential data and housing damage information to explore variations in exposure by district at the time of the quake. The methodology facilitates a comparative analysis of the earthquake's effects across cities with varying Peak Ground Acceleration (PGA) levels and associated housing damage. Various estimation methods and sensitivity checks are implemented to validate the underlying hypotheses. The negative impact of the BioBío earthquake is evident in both the short term (within months of the event) and the medium term (one year following the earthquake), with high school and college students being the most severely affected, even three to five years after the disaster. However, this effect dissipates by 2017. Furthermore, based on the conducted tests, the detrimental effects of the earthquake and tsunami on educational attendance rates become significant only when PGA and housing damage reach extremely high levels. In contrast, no significant effects are observed at lower levels of either variable. Based on the hypotheses examined, several policy recommendations are proposed.

Persons experiencing homelessness represent one of the principal manifestations of the phenomenon of social exclusion, with homeless women constituting a group in a particularly vulnerable situation. The article analyzed the experience of violence in childhood and adolescence, and its implications in terms of violence experienced as an adult, in a sample of women experiencing homelessness in Madrid (Spain) (n = 138). All participants were of legal age and had spent the night before the interview in a shelter or other facility for the homeless, on the street, in public spaces or in places not suitable for sleeping. Information was gathered through a structured interview. The results show that the interviewees had experienced a high percentage of physical, psychological, and/or sexual violence, both in their childhood and adolescence and throughout their lives, with a strong correlation between the experience of violence in childhood and the experience of violence in adulthood, particularly sexual assaults, intimate partner violence, and sex work. The experience of childhood sexual abuse among women experiencing homelessness appears to have had particularly negative consequences in adulthood. Public policies, prevention programs, and care mechanisms with a gendered perspective must be implemented, aimed at reducing the number and intensity of situations of violence experienced by women and girls at risk of social exclusion or in a homeless situation.

The Great Recession (2008-2013) worsened the labour market position of young workers in Spain. This paper analyses the factors that condition young people’s access to the labour market and their employment stability. It employs duration and multivariate models to analyse data from the Continuous Sample of Working Lives (Muestra Continua de Vidas Laborales, MCVL). The main results indicate that workers under 30 years of age who enter into open-ended labour contracts are more likely to be employed after two years, but that only 50% of these initial contracts survive. This instability is explained principally by the structure of labour demand. 

As they were just coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, Southern European nations were confronted with a new shock to their economies – this time in the form of a steep rise in prices. This article describes and typifies the social policy responses and measures adopted in Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain in response to rising inflation. We find that Southern European (SE) governments have put forward a substantive fiscal response – which compares well with that of its neighbours, and even with the previous crisis. The thrust of the response was targeted at limiting the pass-through of international energy prices to consumers. This was complemented, albeit to a lesser degree, with direct support to families. Nevertheless, we do find important differences concerning the weight given to (traditional) welfare transfers, and the role given to indexation mechanisms and wage increases. We also find important continuities with the model of crisis-response adopted during the pandemic. 

The Moroccan economy has undergone significant structural changes since the 1980s. Attracting Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) has been a key strategy for the country’s economic growth and development, particularly in some specific high value-added sectors, such as the automotive supply industry. This paper uses the results of a survey to examine the reasons why multinational enterprises (MNEs) in the automotive supply sector set up in Morocco. Our findings show that proximity to Europe and labor costs and skills are the most important considerations for investing in this sector in Morocco. However, some institutional issues are still of concern to these MNEs.

Official statistics indicated a break in Okun’s law in all the Spanish regions due to the COVID-19 pandemic; however, herein, evidence of the validity of the law is shown. e temporary layoff procedures (ERTEs) allowed many workers to maintain their jobs. From the productive point of view, the law remained in effect in the regions, showing a strong relationship between idle labour resources and economic activity, and from the social point of view, the apparent breakdown of the law can be interpreted as the implementation of a policy that mitigated the dramatic impact of the economic crisis. 

While a growing literature documents the negative impact of motherhood on women’s career trajectories, the specific mechanisms behind their “decisions” to leave the labor market remain largely undocumented. Our paper fills this gap by showing that career breaks due to health-related issues restrict young mothers from full labor force participation. Using Belgian administrative data from 2002-2016 and an event study design, we reveal that the gender gap in sickness absences only appears after the birth of a first child, and is predominantly reflecting an increase in mental health disorders. Surprisingly, this child penalty does not disappear over the long run: even up to eight years after childbirth, women are 1.2 percentage points more likely than men to stop working because of health-related issues. When connecting sickness absences to the overall child penalty in employment, we find that 17% of women who leave the labor market after having children go on to claim sickness benefits. This effect is the largest for mothers in physically demanding jobs, and more moderate for those in family-friendly occupations. 

This article studies in a sample of women and men living homeless in Spain the issues that are most closely linked to involvement in the criminal justice system and incarceration. The study was carried out in Madrid (Spain) with a representative sample of men living homeless (n = 158) and a sample of women living homeless of a similar size (n = 138). A structured interview was used to gather the information. Results show that people living homeless in Madrid have had a greater degree of involvement with the criminal justice system and show higher levels of imprisonment, both before and after finding themselves in homeless situations. People living homeless who were imprisoned presented factors of particular vulnerability: Periods of childhood and adolescence in dysfunctional family settings, more frequently situations of homelessness, worse physical and mental health conditions, and higher levels of alcohol and drug abuse. 

This paper aims to understand if differences in European countries’ tax-benefit systems impact on individual levels of economic insecurity beyond their socioeconomic and demographic characteristics, with an additional focus on households with children. We consider 29 European countries and use multilevel modelling techniques to study the simultaneous role of micro and macro determinants on a multidimensional index of economic insecurity. Our results show that larger welfare systems and generous general social risk policies for unemployment, bad health and social exclusion are correlated with lower insecurity levels, also for households with children who may receive other transfers specifically targeted to them. 

We study the impact of the pandemic crisis using monthly data covering the universe of individuals registered as unemployed in mainland Portuguese municipalities, complemented with electronic payments, linked employer–employee data, and furlough records. Event study designs identify a sharp increase in unemployment, driven mostly by termination of temporary contracts, and a decrease in new job placements. With triple difference-in-differences, we show that the effects are stronger in more dual municipal labour markets, i.e. with a higher share of temporary jobs, concentrated in young workers and middle educated individuals. The asymmetries are exacerbated by the duality of the municipal labour market. 

The way people absorb and process politically relevant information is central to their subsequent political behaviour (in terms of turnout and vote choice). Nonetheless, little is known about how young voters – who might be more impressionable than more experienced voters – respond to the provision of such information. In this article, we design a between-subject randomised controlled trial that exposes a sample of university students to positive, neutral or negative information about central government performance before the 2017 Portuguese local elections. We find that young voters update their perceptions more when exposed to negative news. This negativity bias is stronger for first-time voters. We also find that negative information significantly affects turnout of initially undecided young voters. Our results imply that sensitivity to information is heterogeneous and that some young voters may be prone to manipulation through the provision of negative news.

The systems that underpin modern and extensive welfare states remain essential for fostering higher levels of economic efficiency in developed countries and for mitigating a wide range of economic and social risks in response to the evolving needs of citizens. The new handbook, coordinated by Professor Luis Ayala from UNED and focused on the Economics of the Welfare State through policy analysis, offers a detailed and comprehensive examination of the role of efficiency and equity in each policy area. This makes it a crucial and up-to-date guide for public policy decisions in the 21st century. 

Intergenerational income mobility has attracted the interest of many economists for—among other reasons—its role as a mechanism for reducing inequalities and achieving equal opportunities. In this paper, we analyse the intergenerational mobility of income in Spain in the years 2005 and 2011, located at different phases of the economic cycle. We use proxy variables (the economic situation of the household during the adolescence of the informant and the educational level achieved by parents) to study intergenerational income mobility, because there are not extant surveys with income information from parents and their descendants when they are part of a different household. With these variables, we try to verify the existence and degree of mobility by analysing different methodologies. The results suggest the existence of mobility in the two studied years, although a trend towards a reduction in intergenerational mobility is confirmed, already detected by other authors. 

The article proposes a novel multidimensional operationalization of precarious employment using the AlkireFoster dual threshold counting approach methodology. The proposal is made in a context in which, although precarious employment tends to be considered a multidimensional construct characterized by an accumulation of unfavorable features of employment quality, there is neither a standard and generally accepted definition nor operationalization of the phenomenon in the literature. The proposed methodology has the advantages that it can be easily applied to the usual content of most labor surveys and that it allows an analysis of both the scale and the nature of precariousness. The illustrative evidence obtained for Spain reveals both a high incidence of multidimensional precariousness (affecting almost 40% of wage earners) and a high intensity (multidimensional precarious wage earners suffer from around 3 job deprivations). Moreover, it shows that employment precariousness is highly persistent over time and tends to grow over time and that there is great heterogeneity in the scope of the phenomenon according to its individual incidence and among different groups of workers.

This article analyses patterns of persistence in both vertical and horizontal educational mismatch in the early career of university graduates in Spain, with particular emphasis on the mediating role of job mobility. We explore whether educational mismatch is a stepping stone towards better-matched positions or whether graduates get trapped in mismatched jobs. Our results show that job mobility partially corrects educational mismatch (supporting the stepping stone hypothesis), but there is still a strong persistence in educational mismatches four years after graduation (the trap hypothesis). Vertical mismatch is, overall, less persistent than horizontal mismatch, in part because some horizontally mismatched graduates lack incentives to make corrective movements across employers because of compensating job features that keep them in their first jobs. Job rotation and poor accumulation of employment experience challenge the correcting role of job mobility in educational mismatch risk. These results reflect relevant features of the Spanish labour market: segmentation, intensive job turnover and high youth unemployment. 

This work adopts different approaches to analyse situations of poverty and extreme poverty in Spain during the last decade, considering different monetary thresholds, measures of severe material deprivation and the combination of both. The determining factors of these situations and the patterns that act as a link between extreme poverty and homelessness are also examined. The results of the study show that for the most restrictive thresholds of 10 per cent and 20 per cent of the median equivalised disposable income the smallest variations during the series are observed, confirming that situations of such deep poverty are not influenced by the cycle since they do not respond to economic stimuli. The determinants of extreme poverty suggest that public policies should be target towards high-risk groups, such as single person households, households with children, younger individuals, individuals with a low educational attainment, and of foreign nationality. Finally, an interesting result is that the profile of individuals in situations of consistent poverty have the greatest similarities to the group of people experiencing homelessness. 

The paper analyses the health situation and the perceived health status of a sample of women experiencing homelessness (n = 138) in Madrid, Spain. All participants were adults, and the night before the baseline interview, they had slept on the street, at a shelter or any facility provided to care for people living homeless. The information was collected using structured interviews, repeated twice a year for a 3-year follow-up period. The findings of this study show that women experiencing homelessness presented poor health, particularly in comparison with the general Spanish population. Over half of the women questioned claimed to have a diagnosed serious or chronic illness, with a correlation between these conditions and the age, time spent homeless or high levels of drug use. There was a positive correlation found between women's perceived health status and being younger and having access to independent accommodation, while having suffered a number of stressful life events and having spent long periods of time living homeless presented a negative correlation with a good perceived health status. 

People living homeless are quite heterogeneous groups, including different subgroups with specific characteristics that vary substantially. Within this group, women living homeless are an understudied subgroup with specific necessities which in most cases have not been addressed in general studies related to the group. The present study examines determining factors that influence the levels of overall happiness and outlook for the future of women living homeless. To fulfill this objective, a survey was conducted on a group of women living homeless in the city of Madrid (Spain). The results of a structural equation modeling analysis found that having a larger and stable social support network, loneliness, and good health conditions without any problems associated with drug abuse are the main factors influencing their levels of overall happiness and their outlook for the future. The proposed model has also shown that stressful life events play an important role in the analysis, unlike economic aspects, which have a limited impact on their situation. This article provides new information and innovation in research about homelessness, in particular women living homeless, thus being important for extending and replicating its findings to an international context. 

This article investigates the impact of parenthood on women’s labour market outcomes in Belgium. Using administrative data and an event study design, we show that mothers lose 32% of their labour earnings relative to fathers, up to eight years after the birth of their first child. Furthermore, we find a strong positive correlation between the size of the child penalty for a given sector and the share of its workers who report working atypical work schedules or irregular hours, suggesting that job characteristics matter in determining the size of the child penalty.

Economic difficulties during recessions affect young individuals’ life projects and may delay emancipation and childbearing. For a period of persistent growth, previous analyses on emancipation in Spain found a key role of the “adapting to circumstances” attitude in youth cohabiting living arrangements: a large number of young individuals reduce their poverty risk by remaining at their parental homes if both parents are employed, and at the same time, a significant number of households reduce their poverty risk by adding cohabiting young workers’ wages to their disposable income. Using individual and household employment deprivation information from an extensive dataset, we study the evolution and determinants of youth living arrangements and economic outcomes for a large period including a bust, a deep recession and a recovery. Our results show that in addition to individual labor market status, the employment deprivation levels of other active household members are key determinants of youth economic outcomes and living arrangements decisions all along the business cycle.

Intergenerational income mobility has attracted the interest of many economists for—among other reasons—its role as a mechanism for reducing inequalities and achieving equal opportunities. In this paper, we analyse the intergenerational mobility of income in Spain in the years 2005 and 2011, located at different phases of the economic cycle. We use proxy variables (the economic situation of the household during the adolescence of the informant and the educational level achieved by parents) to study intergenerational income mobility, because there are not extant surveys with income information from parents and their descendants when they are part of a different household. With these variables, we try to verify the existence and degree of mobility by analysing different methodologies. The results suggest the existence of mobility in the two studied years, although a trend towards a reduction in intergenerational mobility is confirmed, already detected by other authors.

Housing deprivation is a key determinant of the capacity to prevent infection and to recover from a disease because poor housing prevents adequate sheltering during a quarantine. We analyze the degree of housing deprivation faced by households in European countries when COVID-19 lockdown measures were enacted. To do so, we propose a synthetic measure that includes more dimensions than the official Eurostat indicator of severe housing deprivation. We use a fuzzy set approach to measure housing deprivation so that, unlike traditional deprivation approaches, based on a dichotomous variable, we can identify different degrees of housing deprivation for each household in the population. We find similar orderings of housing deprivation dimensions by country with the highest degree of deprivation in the living space dimension and the lowest one in the standard housing or technology deprivation dimension. Nonetheless, housing deprivation levels differ across countries, with Eastern European households being significantly more housing deprived than the rest when the lockdown began. This result shows that the effects of the lockdown on social well-being have not affected all Europeans equally and emphasizes the need for government measures that promote decent housing.

We use novel and comprehensive monthly data on electronic payments, by municipality and sector, together with cash withdrawals, to study the impact of Covid-19 in Portugal. Our difference-in-differences event study identifies a causal decrease of 17 and 40 percentage points on the year-on-year growth rate of overall purchases in March and April 2020. We document a stronger impact of the crisis in more central and more urban municipalities, due to a combination of the sectorial composition effect of the local economy and the sharper confinement behavioral effect in these locations. We discuss the importance of tourism for the results. 

In this article we explore the elements that have influenced the socio-historical configuration of the Third Sector of Social Action (TSAS) as a prominent actor in the Spanish mixed welfare system. Bearing in mind that this process of creation and expansion of private non-profit organizations operating in the social sphere has been parallel to the process of decentralization of a large part of the responsibility for social policies of the Spanish welfare state to the autonomous communities, we ask ourselves about the differences that have marked the particular trajectories of the TSSA in the autonomous communities. For this purpose, we rely on secondary and primary sources (interviews and group meetings) collected in the framework of the PECOTSAS project in a selection of autonomous community cases. We have structured the comparative analysis on the basis of three types of elements: a) the political conditions that make the TSSA possible; b) the structural conditions of economic and territorial development; and c) the social actors who play a leading role in social mobilization linked to TSSA organizations. The results suggest that the patterns of autonomous differentiation of the TSSA are rooted both in the forms of unequal distribution of power resulting from the process of democratic transition and in the differences in the patterns of economic development, population distribution and historical traditions of social mobilization of the Spanish regions, without losing sight of the fact that these elements also have an impact on intra-regional differences.

Spain, unlike other Southern European countries, recalibrated its income maintenance system in the 1980s, containing its contributory programs and creating a set of means-tested programs. Despite its contribution to severe poverty reduction, this set has limitations and inconsistencies that have led to its reform entering the national political agenda since 2015. These programs, although more effective than their Italian or Greek equivalents, are still very much linked to a Fordist model that expects any job to be able to lift a household out of poverty. This model is unable to cope with changes in family structure, increasingly difficult access to housing and, above all, new forms of precarious employment. The article analyses the path of those guaranteed income schemes in which the new Minimum Living Income benefit may improve the coverage of existing social assistance programs but leaves unresolved its adequacy to the new forms of employment.

This article analyses patterns of persistence in both vertical and horizontal educational mismatch in the early career of university graduates in Spain, with particular emphasis on the mediating role of job mobility. We explore whether educational mismatch is a stepping stone towards better-matched positions or whether graduates get trapped in mismatched jobs. Our results show that job mobility partially corrects educational mismatch (supporting the stepping stone hypothesis), but there is still a strong persistence in educational mismatches four years after graduation (the trap hypothesis). Vertical mismatch is, overall, less persistent than horizontal mismatch, in part because some horizontally mismatched graduates lack incentives to make corrective movements across employers because of compensating job features that keep them in their first jobs. Job rotation and poor accumulation of employment experience challenge the correcting role of job mobility in educational mismatch risk. These results reflect relevant features of the Spanish labour market: segmentation, intensive job turnover and high youth unemployment.

This work analyses the deprivation levels of people living homeless in Spain and France before and during the Great Recession. The study uses a multidimensional perspective considering economic, social, and health aspects. To accomplish this, we obtain several indicators using the counting approach methodology and stochastic dominance techniques with statistical inference. Finally, the main factors that influence the probability of being multidimensionally deprived are analysed. The results of the study show that, although health and social dimensions have a particular relevance, indicators related to social assistance and housing instability have a greater influence on their situation. These results are intended to contribute better knowledge of an understudied group and to guide the design of future public policies.

Economic insecurity is a relevant dimension of well-being. The limited availability of subjective expectations’ surveys makes multidimensional insecurity indices based on living conditions surveys a valuable alternative. We study differences in synthetic indicators of insecurity for Spain using different methods to aggregate and weigh dimensions. We show that its evolution and distribution is robust to the aggregation procedure, even though levels do differ. All procedures present strengths and weaknesses but the counting approach has a direct economic interpretation and can better capture insecurity in the middle classes. Other aggregation methods are less transparent and give more relevance to extreme situations.

The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic had an unprecedented economic impact on most of the world's developed economies. In Spain, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) fell by more than 17% in one quarter and many households suffered income losses. The aim of this paper is to measure the size and distribution of these losses by assessing changes in inequality and poverty and evaluating the capacity of public policies to maintain social cohesion. The results suggest that the increase in inequality has been smaller than the increase in the at-risk-of-poverty rate, which grew more in young single-income households.

This paper assesses the impact on household incomes of the COVID-19 pandemic and governments’ policy responses in April 2020 in four large and severely hit EU countries: Belgium, Italy, Spain and the UK. We provide comparative evidence on the level of relative and absolute welfare resilience at the onset of the pandemic, by creating counterfactual scenarios using the European tax-benefit model EUROMOD combined with COVID-19-related household surveys and timely labor market data. We find that income poverty increased in all countries due to the pandemic while inequality remained broadly the same. Differences in the impact of policies across countries arose from four main sources: the asymmetric dimension of the shock by country, the different protection offered by each tax-benefit system, the diverse design of discretionary measures and differences in the household level circumstances and living arrangements of individuals at risk of income loss in each country.

Economic insecurity is a key well-being outcome because the anticipation of future economic distress reveals itself as a true threat to current well-being. Insecurity has been shown to affect quality of life and to change an individual’s consumption, fertility, labor supply and even political support decisions to mitigate risk. This paper provides evidence on the dimension, nature and distribution of economic insecurity for 27 European countries during a whole decade by using a multidimensional individual approach that considers both objective and subjective indicators. The young, the less educated and the unemployed living in households with dependent children have significantly higher levels of economic insecurity everywhere. However, insecurity affects the population in the middle class only in some countries but not in others, and the level of insecurity in liberal regimes is more linked to large income losses than elsewhere. The role of objective versus subjective dimensions is larger in post-transition Eastern European regimes than in long-standing capitalist countries.

This article examines the evolution of employment precariousness in Spain based on a new method of constructing multidimensional precarious measures. This methodology resembles the one proposed by Alkire and Foster (2007, 2011) for multidimensional poverty in the framework of the counting approach. The main novelty of the approach adopted resides in the use of hedonic weights derived from the subjective evaluation by employees for the selection of the different dimensions of jobs that make up multidimensional precariousness and the quantification of their relative influence. The evidence obtained reveals that the precariousness of employment created in Spain has intensified significantly in recent years and that the strong temporary nature of employment is the most salient component of this precariousness from a multidimensional perspective.

This study examines the key competencies that young people at risk of exclusion must develop to achieve integration into the labour market, and assesses their level of integration after their participation in the programme proposed. A programme for developing Social Skills is undertaken for three weeks. A methodology is presented to that end, based on constructing three synthetic indicators which aggregate and measure the different components proposed: Appearance, Confidence, Attitude, and Organisation and Planning. These three models measure the aspects before the programme and the aspects after the programme and the improvements are analysed. The results of the study are based on a sample of 373 young people between 18 and 30 belonging to vulnerable groups. An analysis of the results shows that the competencies that underwent the most significant changes were Attitude and Organisation and Planning. Control variables are applied (gender, age, experience and level of education). The results obtained in the model studying the aftermath of the programme show that the competence of Confidence influences the student's recruitment and incorporation into employment. 

Income distribution remains a crucial topic in economic analysis, among other reasons, due to the increase in inequality in recent years, as one of the effects of the Great Recession. In this context, proposing parametric models that represent the full distribution through a small number of parameters arouses great interest as an instrument for economic analysis. This paper studies the ability of log Student’s t distribution to model the size distribution of income due to its potential to reproduce the effect of a mode around low-incomes as well as its precision in capturing the degree of kurtosis of empirical distributions. These characteristics make the log-t an ideal analysis tool, for instance, for exploring the effects of anti-poverty policies. The model has been fitted to income data for the EU25 and for several years. The conclusion is that the log Student’s t distribution offers the best fit in the vast majority of cases.

This paper analyses the situation of the homeless in Spain before and during the Great Recession, using a multidimensional approach based on the construction of a new indicator of their deprivations, inspired by a counting approach mainly developed for poverty analysis. This indicator considers dimensions related to health and social contacts, in addition to purely economic ones. Using data from 2005 and 2012, the static analysis is complemented with a study of the changes experienced by the homeless before and during the Great Recession and how some sociodemographic aspects are related to their probability of being a worse situation of multidimensional deprivation. Results show that the levels of deprivation in the homeless population declined after the Great Recession. 

Homeless people are one of the most obvious embodiments of the phenomenon of social exclusion, and homeless immigrants and homeless women are considered 2 particularly vulnerable groups. The objective of this article is to analyze the differences between women living homeless born in Spain (nonimmigrants) and those born abroad (immigrants). The study was carried out based on the data obtained from a sample of women living homeless in Madrid (Spain; N = 136). The information was collected using a structured interview. The results show major similarities between immigrant and nonimmigrant homeless women in terms of their basic sociodemographic characteristics (age, marital status, number of children), their state of health, satisfaction with their family and/or partner relationships, and feelings of loneliness or abandonment. Fewer immigrant women had their documentation in order, they received fewer financial benefits and their contact with their family of origin was more limited. However, the immigrant women became homeless at an older age and were subject to less chronic homelessness, their levels of consumption of alcohol and other psychoactive substances were lower, they had experienced fewer stressful life events, more of them had completed higher education, and more of them used mobile telephones and the Internet.

Spain is one of the European countries where child risk of poverty is highest in the continent. The two main characteristics of the Spanish tax-benefit system are the large redistributive weight of contributory pensions and the low level of expenditure on family-related policies. All EU countries have child benefit policies, either universal or means-tested, that promote social cohesion and reduce child social exclusion: 17 out of 28 European Union countries have a universal Child Benefit policy. The aim of this paper is to present how to implement up-to-date evaluation methods that allow researchers to measure the distributive impact, effectiveness, efficiency and budgetary cost of different policy options to promote intergenerational social cohesion.

This article assessed changes in the association between single motherhood and children’s verbal cognitive ability at age-11 using data from three cohorts of British children, born in 1958 (n = 10,675), 1970 (n = 8,933) and 2000 (n = 9,989), and mediation analysis. Consistent with previous studies, direct effects were small and insignificant. For those born in 1958 and 1970 indirect effects, operating through reduced economic and parental resources, were associated with −.107-SD to −.156-SD lower attainment. Differences between the two cohorts, and by children’s age when parents separated, were insignificant. For the 2000 cohort, effect sizes for children born to single mothers did not change significantly (−.112-SD) but attenuated for children whose parents separated in early childhood (−.076-SD) or while of school age (−.054-SD). 

This study analyzes the evolution of salary polarization in the Spanish labor market. The paper proposes the use of mixed distributions to examine the consequences of the economic crisis in one of the European markets in which the unemployment rate has had greatest impact. Applying this type of distribution aims to establish the contribution of a fixed group (the unemployed population, in this particular case) to overall polarization. How unemployment benefits impact on polarization has also been analyzed. Generally speaking, the tendency of the polarization indexes calculated changes around the beginning of the crisis, with decreasing numbers during the economic growth period and the opposite behaviour in the crisis period. In addition, when mixed distributions are used, the results show that the unemployed group has played an important role in the increase of social tension from 2008 onwards. Finally, the evidence obtained shows that unemployment subsidies do not always reduce salary tensions between group populations and, in some cases, increase polarization. 

The effect of wage polarization on total factor productivity (TFP) in the Spanish regions between 2004 and 2012 is analysed using dynamic panel estimates. The main finding of this research is that there seems to be some evidence that polarization can affect productivity negatively. Although the specification of the models seems to be correct, the time period studied is brief, so these results should be interpreted with caution.