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on Unemployment, Inequality and Poverty |
| By: | Thaning, Max; Nieuwenhuis, Rense (Stockholm University) |
| Abstract: | While micro-level research shows that employed individuals are less likely to experience poverty, macro-level trends reveal disappointing poverty reduction despite substantial employment growth across European countries – constituting an employment-poverty paradox. This study addresses this paradox by examining the heterogeneous effects of employment on poverty across different family types, while rigorously accounting for selection processes and confounding through leveraging panel data, varying assumption about causal structure, simulations, and formal sensitivity analysis. We apply a multi-group Kitagawa-Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition to examine how employment prevalences and premiums contribute to poverty differences across varying family-types. Our results suggest that differences in employment prevalences contribute minimally to poverty gaps, while premium effects drive most observable effects. Part-time employment shows even weaker poverty reduction effects across all family types. Sensitivity analysis reveals vulnerability to unmeasured confounding, suggesting true causal effects may be smaller still. In sum, employment is not a panacea for poverty reduction across family types. |
| Date: | 2025–08–26 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:vqzde_v1 |
| By: | Alan Piper |
| Abstract: | Lauded psychotherapist and narcissism expert Otto Kernberg claimed that midlife crises were almost solely a narcissistic phenomenon. This article, in part, takes this claim as inspiration and investigates the relationship between grandiose narcissism and wellbeing. Importantly, and following previous research, this work considers grandiose narcissism in two distinct ways: an agentic admiration aspect (example statement: “Being a special person gives me strength”) and an antagonistic rivalry aspect (“Most people are basically losers”). The results, obtained from an assessment of life satisfaction with a large nationally representative dataset, offer support to the previous small and largely homogenous sample investigations regarding wellbeing and narcissism. The agentic aspect of grandiose narcissism being positive for wellbeing and the antagonistic aspect negative. Additionally, the results highlight the possibility that the midlife low is substantially deeper (shallower) and longer (shorter) for those who exhibit the rivalry (admiration) aspect of grandiose narcissism. Of particular note and novelty is the longitudinal evidence that suggests males who exhibit the rivalry trait in older age experience almost no recovery from the common midlife low. This is a result that aligns well with several discussed theories. |
| Keywords: | wellbeing; narcissism; age; midlife; personality development |
| JEL: | I31 |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:diw:diwsop:diw_sp1229 |
| By: | Bedük, Selçuk (University of Oxford); Yong, Anna |
| Abstract: | While any experience of child poverty can affect life chances, longer exposure is particularly concerning due to its lasting effects on education, health and earnings. This study adopts a life-course perspective, tracking poverty from birth to age 10 for cohorts born in Britain between 1991 and 2017. On average, 17% of children spent at least half of their childhood in poverty. Long-term poverty affected 25% of those born in the early 1990s, markedly declined to 13-14% for cohorts born after the 1997 welfare reforms, and substantially increased again to 23% for children born following the 2013 austerity reforms. Decomposition analysis shows that cross-cohort changes are driven more by shifts in the penalties associated with work and family risk factors than by changes in their prevalence. These shifts in penalties reflect broader changes in redistribution and predistribution. The early decline in long-term poverty was largely due to rising employment and earnings in low-income households, while the post-austerity increase stems mainly from reduced redistribution. For cohorts born in the 2000s, social transfers played a substantial role in containing long-term poverty despite worsening predistribution. Overall, the findings show that long-term childhood poverty remains a significant challenge in Britain and highlight the need for both stronger redistribution and improved predistribution to address it. |
| Date: | 2025–08–26 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:e7pkj_v1 |