Documents Sologon, Denisa Maria 14 results

"This paper looks at the social policy responses to the Great Recession and the COVID-19 crisis and assesses their impact on preserving living standards in Ireland. The former crisis was in an environment pressured to balance budgets with a greater focus on cost reduction. In contrast, during the COVID-19 crisis, there was a greater focus on mitigating the impact on household incomes largely funded by debt. Another innovation in the current crisis were the joint public and private responses through social partnership. Using the microsimulation methodology, we find a stronger social policy response during the COVID-19 crisis than during the financial crisis. However, as the impact of the COVID-19 crisis was deeper and quicker, family support was not as strong as there were more individuals out of work. The contribution of the private support based on social partnership, however, was stronger. As a result, those on lower incomes ended up with higher disposable incomes at the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, albeit with policy learning, this fell over the first wave of the pandemic. We conclude by reporting a positive impact on trust in public institutions during the COVID-19 crisis as opposed to a decline during the financial crisis."

"This paper investigates the gendered effects of the cost-of-living crisis on households across six European countries using household consumption data linked to price changes between April 2021 and July 2023. It examines how different consumption patterns between male- and female-headed households influence their exposure to inflation. Exploring the full distribution of inflation rates, employing quantile regressions and a decomposition approach, this research uncovers gender-specific disparities in inflation exposure and inequality. Going beyond the immediate economic index adjustments, it also evaluates the welfare changes attributable to inflation by estimate a behaviourally-adjusted welfare effect of the cost-of-living crisis. Building on the foundational Atkinson welfare measure, this paper innovates by decomposing the change in welfare into equity and efficiency components, differentially for male- and female-headed households. This contribution enriches the consumption literature by providing a detailed gendered analysis of inflation's distributional and welfare effects, aiding policymakers in addressing the nuanced challenges of the cost-of-living crisis."

"Using microsimulation tools, we explore the social policy responses to the Great Recession and the COVID-19 crisis, and their impact on preserving living standards in Ireland. During the Great Recession, the focus was on cost reduction. By contrast, during the COVID-19 crisis, the focus was on mitigating the impact on household incomes. In addition, an innovation in joint public and private responses emerged through social partnership. We find a stronger policy response during the COVID-19 crisis than the Great Recession. The COVID-19 crisis was more rapid, leaving more individuals out of work, thus family support was weaker. This was compensated by stronger private support through social partnership. Consequently, those with lower incomes had larger disposable incomes at the onset of the crisis; an effect that reduced with policy learning. We find increasing trust in public institutions during the COVID-19 crisis as opposed to a decline during the Great Recession."

"This paper evaluates the gender-specific distributional impact of the recent cost-of-living crisis in six European countries using the Household Budget Survey to assess the degree of regressivity (affecting lower income households more) or progessivity (affecting higher income households more) of inflation experienced by households between April 2021 and July 2023. Despite a growing literature on the distributional impact of inflation, there is limited evidence on gender differentials. We innovate by applying distributional measures and a decomposition method adapted from the taxation literature extended with a gender dimension to assess gender differences in inflation regressivity or progressivity, isolate the average inflation rate from the inflation structure effect and identify the drivers of regressivity/progressivity by broad commodity groups (food, heating/electricity, motor fuels, other goods and services). The findings highlight the greater regressive inflation faced by female-headed households compared to men in middle-income countries like Portugal, Poland and Hungary and high-income countries like Ireland. In Germany overall inflation has a neutral impact on women, whereas Finland stands out with a progressive inflation, more pronounced for female-headed households. Consistent across countries, the burden of food and heating/electricity inflation is disproportionately borne by low-income households. Heating/electricity inflation has a larger regressive contribution to overall inflation for female-headed households in all countries, whereas for food this holds only in Poland and Hungary. The findings highlight the need for targeted policies to address potential inequalities arising from differential consumption patterns and protect the most vulnerable groups."

"Do EU citizens have an increased opportunity to improve their position in the distribution of lifetime earnings? To what extent does earnings mobility work to equalize/disequalize longer-term earnings relative to cross-sectional inequality and how does it differ across the EU? Our basic assumption is that mobility measured over a horizon of 8 years is a good proxy for lifetime mobility. We used the Shorrocks (1978) and the Fields (2008) index. Moreover, we explored the impact of differentials attrition on the two indices. The Fields index is affected to a larger extent by differential attrition than the Shorrocks index, but the overall conclusions are not altered. Based on the Shorrocks (1978) index men across EU have an increasing mobility in the distribution of lifetime earnings as they advance in their career. Based on the Fields index (2008) the equalizing impact of mobility increases over the lifetime in all countries, except Portugal, where it turns negative for long horizons. Thus, Portugal is the only country where mobility acts as a disequalizer of lifetime differentials. The highest lifetime mobility is recorded in Denmark, followed by UK, Belgium, Greece, Ireland, Netherlands, Italy, France, Spain, Germany, and the lowest, Portugal. The highest mobility as equalizer of longer term inequality is recorded in Ireland and Denmark, followed by France and Belgium with similar values, then UK, Greece, Netherlands, Germany, Spain and Italy. "

"Do EU citizens have an increased opportunity to improve their position in the distribution of earnings over time? This question is answered by exploring short and long-term wage mobility for males across 14 EU countries between 1994 and 2001 using ECHP. Mobility is evaluated using rank measures which capture positional movements in the distribution of earnings. All countries recording an increase in cross-sectional inequality recorded also a decrease in short-term mobility. Among countries where inequality decreased, short-term mobility increased in Denmark, Spain, Ireland and UK, and decreased in Belgium, France and Ireland. Long-term mobility is higher than short-term mobility, but long-term persistency is still high in all countries. The lowest long-term mobility is found in Luxembourg followed by four clusters: first, Spain, France and Germany; second, Netherlands, and Portugal; third, UK, Italy and Austria; forth, Greece, Finland, Belgium and Ireland. The highest long-term mobility is recorded in Denmark. "

"This paper analyses the dynamic structure of individual earnings across 14 EU countries over the period 1994-2001 using ECHP. Understanding wage mobility and its link with the evolution of cross-sectional earnings inequality is important from a welfare perspective, particularly given the large variety in national cross-sectional wage inequality. This is highly relevant in the context of the changes that took place in the EU labour market policy framework after 1995 under the incidence of the 1994 OECD Jobs Strategy, which recommend policies to increase wage flexibility, lower non-wage labour costs and allow relative wages to better reflect individual differences in productivity and local labour market conditions. What is the source of earnings variation? Did the increase in cross-sectional wage inequality observed in some countries result from greater transitory fluctuations in earnings and individuals facing a higher degree of earnings mobility? Or is this rise reflecting increasing permanent differences between individuals with mobility remaining constant or even falling? Are there common trends in earnings inequality and mobility across countries? Equally weighted minimum distance methods are used to estimate the covariance structure of earnings, decompose earnings into a permanent and a transitory component and conclude about their evolution. As expected, a notable change was an increased country heterogeneity, which translated itself in the level and evolution of the cross-sectional earnings inequality components. The decrease in cross-sectional inequality was accompanied by an increase in mobility, and therefore a decrease in the importance of the permanent component relative to the transitory component in Denmark, Belgium and Spain, and by a decrease in earnings mobility in Germany, France, UK, Ireland and Austria. In Luxembourg, Italy, Greece, Portugal, and Finland, the increase in cross-sectional inequality was accompanied by a decrease in mobility, whereas in Netherlands by an increase. "

"Providing equal opportunities to all members of society independent of an individual's socio-economic background is a major objective of German policy makers. However, evidence on the access to education suggests that opportunities of children with a non-academic family background are still unequally obstructed. When analysing the labour market implications of this social disadvantage in human capital, social capital as an additional source of inequality often lacks attention. Drawing on the instrumental value of rather loose contacts (i.e. weak ties) on the labour market as revealed by Mark Granovetter (1974), this research paper goes beyond the human capital approach and includes a measure of instrumental social capital in the form of weak-tie career support in the earnings function. We shed light on the structure of the wage gap between those with and without an academic family background and complement an Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition with quantile regressions to analyse potential capital and return deficits separately. We find that a significant part of the wage gap can be explained by deficits that those from less educated families incur with respect to human and instrumental social capital. While the capital deficit due to educational attainment is larger, a non-academic family background is further associated with a significant deficit in returns to instrumental social capital at some parts of the distribution. As this suggests inequalities of opportunity on the German labour market to occur along the lines of parental education even beyond the education system, it urges policy makers to consider designing equality measures that do the same."

"The COVID‐19 emergency has had a dramatic impact on market incomes and income‐support policies. The lack of timely available data constrains the estimation of the scale and direction of recent changes in the income distribution, which in turn constrains policymakers seeking to monitor such developments. We overcome the lack of data by proposing a dynamic calibrated microsimulation approach to generate counterfactual income distributions as a function of more timely external data than are available in dated income surveys. We combine nowcasting methods using publicly available data and a household income generation model to perform the first calibrated simulation based upon actual data, aiming to assess the distributional implications of the COVID‐19 crisis in Ireland. Overall, we find that the crisis had an equalizing real‐time effect for both gross and disposable incomes, notwithstanding the significant hardship experienced by many households."