Mothers' employment and child care choices across the European Union.

The aim of this paper is to analyse cross-country differences in the maternal employment patterns and the demand for formal and informal child care as interrelated decisions across Europe. We explore a sample of preschoolers and their mothers drawn from the EU-SILC (2005-2013) in a set of 11 EU countries with different institutional settings. The analytical strategy - a set of simultaneous tobit models - allows for mutual interdependencies across decisions. The results vary across welfare regimes and are related to the public provision of child care as well as other dimensions of the institutional context and values. We have found complementarities between paid employment and child care while formal and informal care are shown to be mutual substitutes, even in countries where the provision of external, formal child care is very extended and child care does not depend much on families. This means that the mere expansion of public child care is not enough to improve maternal employment rates. Other institutional aspects of the labour market and societal values also need to be taken into account in this endeavour.

Who supports whom? Do adult children living at home share their incomes with their parents?

Across the developed world, young adults are now more likely to live with their parents than they were two or three decades ago. This is typically viewed, both in the media and in scholarly research, as an economic burden on parents. This article investigates, for the first time, the extent to which financial support is also given in the opposite direction, with young people contributing to their households' living costs. We use data on 19 European countries from the 2010 European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (N = 553 in Austria to N = 2777 in Italy). Many young adults do share their incomes with their families, with the degree of sharing being the highest among the poorest households. In a substantial minority of households, particularly in lower-income countries, the contributions of young adult household members keep households out of poverty.

Determinants of regional differences in rates of overeducation in Europe.

This paper examines the factors determining variations in spatial rates of overeducation. A quantile regression model has been implemented on a sample of region-yearly data drawn from the EU Survey on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) and several institutional and macroeconomic features captured from other data-sets. Potential determinants of overeducation rates include factors such as labour market risk, financial aid to university students, excess labour demand and institutional factors. We find significant effects both for labour market structural imbalances and institutional factors. The research supports the findings of micro based studies which have found that overeducation is consistent with an assignment interpretation of the labour market.

Education is a key determinant of health in Europe: a comparative analysis of 11 countries.

This paper has contributed to confirming the link between education and health in developed countries. The analysis is based on 11 European Union countries. We estimate country-specific health functions, where the dependent variable is self-reported health status and the education attainment is one of the main inputs. All eight waves (1994-2001) of the European Community Household Panel are deployed. A random effects ordered probit is estimated in order to control, to a given extent, for unobserved heterogeneity. Explanatory variables are both time invariant (education attainment and gender) and time varying (gross wages, hours of work, age and living alone). Results confirm the positive impact of secondary education on health in most cases and tertiary education in all cases, even after controlling for other inputs in the health function and taking unobserved heterogeneity into account. Secondary education has an impact on health in all countries in the sample except for The Netherlands and UK. The effect does not differ between secondary and tertiary education in France, Ireland and Greece. The correlation between education and health is interpreted in different but complementary ways by diverse approaches and we may not disentangle the precise mechanism that connects health with education from our results. Anyway, it seems clear that better coordination is needed between education and health policies to effectively improve health literacy. Other relevant results from our study are that women register poorer health than men, age contributes to worsening health status and wages contribute positively to health.