Social Investment Working Group Session

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

The EUI Social Investment Working Group hosts a talk by Rense Nieuwenhuis, Associate Professor in Sociology at the Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI) at Stockholm University.

In this seminar, Rense Nieuwenhuis will first focus on recent research on the situation of single parents in dual-earner societies. In this research, he examines the relative poverty risk among single-parent households in countries that have a large share of households with dual earners. Data from the Luxembourg Income Study are used to analyze eighteen OECD countries in the period 1984 to 2010. He finds that single parents face higher relative income poverty risks in countries with a large share of dual-earner households and that the higher risk of poverty is related to higher standards of living in those countries: higher standards of living have raised poverty thresholds, and single-parent incomes are less likely to reach those higher poverty thresholds. He also finds that this overall pattern varies across institutional contexts: a rise of dual-earner households puts single parents at a disadvantage only in countries that have relatively low public expenditures on childcare and relatively low-income transfer policies. In the second part of the talk, he will expand on these findings, by discussing (possible) policy interplays in terms of welfare pluralism, complementarity and substitutability.

About the speaker: 

Rense Nieuwenhuis studies how family diversity and social policy affect poverty and economic inequality. His recent research focus is on single-parent families, how women's earnings affect inequality between households, and family policy outcomes. He analyses policy interplays in terms of welfare pluralism, complementarity and substitutability. 

Discussant: Ilze Plavgo (postdoctoral Research Fellow, EUI)