Wolfgang Ludwig-Mayerhofer

Bio: Wolfgang Ludwig-Mayerhofer is an academic researcher from University of Siegen. The author has contributed to research in topics: Unemployment & Public employment service. The author has an hindex of 12, co-authored 47 publications receiving 557 citations. Previous affiliations of Wolfgang Ludwig-Mayerhofer include Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich & Folkwang University of the Arts.

The Allocation of Money in Couples: The End of Inequality?

Abstract: Summary: Research conducted in the 1980s and early 1990s showed considerable inequalities within male-female couples as concerns financial arrangements and access to personal spending money. This paper provides an analysis of the allocation of money in German couples that goes beyond previous research in two respects. First, data are used that permit direct, albeit only rough, assessments of the amount of personal spending money available to each of the partners. Second, it is therefore possible to investigate in some detail the factors that may influence the availability of personal spending money and thus also the possible differences between the woman and the man concerning the amount of money available to each of them. The empirical analysis is based on the German Low Income Panel (NIedrig-Einkommens-Panel, NIEP), a panel study representative of households with an income lower than about 1.5 times the German social assistance rate in 1999, the year of the first wave. We use the fourth wave of the NIEP, in which questions about couples’ money management were added to the questionnaire. The data refer to those 718 households that consisted of an adult couple, with or without children. While not all couples allocate the same amount of money to each partner, there is no difference in the proportion of men and women who have more money at their disposal than their partners. A number of hypotheses are tested concerning the amount of money allocated to individual partners, and the effects are basically the same for men and women. Investigation of the effects on the within-couple differences in personal spending money shows that the balance shifts in favor of the male partner if his education is superior to that of the female partner. This holds specifically for couples with very low incomes. Zusammenfassung: Untersuchungen in den 1980er und fruhen 1990er Jahren haben gezeigt, dass innerhalb von Paarbeziehungen eine betrachtliche Ungleichheit der Geldarrangements und beim Zugang zu Geld fur personliche Ausgaben besteht. Die hier vorgelegten Analysen der Allokation von Geld in Paarbeziehungen gehen in zweierlei Hinsicht uber die bisherigen Untersuchungen hinaus: Erstens erlauben die hier verwendeten Daten eine direkte, wenn auch grobe, Einschatzung des Geldbetrages, der jedem Partner fur die personlichen Ausgaben zur Verfugung steht. Zweitens konnen wir detailliert die Faktoren bestimmen, die die Verfugung uber Geld fur personliche Ausgaben und somit auch mogliche Unterschiede zwischen Mannern und Frauen in der Verfugung uber Geld beeinflussen. Wir verwenden Daten des Niedrig-Einkommens-Panels (NIEP), einer reprasentativen Untersuchung von Haushalten, die in der ersten Panel-Welle im Jahr 1999 uber ein Einkommen verfugten, das unter dem 1,5-fachen des damals gultigen Sozialhilfesatzes lag. In der unseren Auswertungen zugrunde liegenden vierten Welle waren einige Fragen zur Geldverwaltung enthalten. Unser Datensatz bezieht sich auf 718 Paarhaushalte mit und ohne Kinder. In den meisten Paarbeziehungen konnen beide Partner uber den gleichen Geldbetrag verfugen, und wenn das nicht der Fall ist, verfugen Manner genauso haufig wie Frauen uber mehr Geld als der Partner. Eine Reihe von Hypothesen uber die Geldzuteilung in Paarbeziehungen wird getestet. Die gefundenen Effekte sind bei Mannern und Frauen im Wesentlichen die gleichen. Die Verfugung uber Geld verschiebt sich zu Gunsten des Mannes, wenn dieser hoher qualifiziert ist als die Frau. Besonders ausgepragt ist dieser Zusammenhang in Haushalten mit sehr geringem Einkommen.

Eppur si muove? Activation policies in Austria and Germany

Abstract: Current debates about activation policies focus only to a very limited degree on continental or conservative welfare states, as countries like Austria and Germany are usually assumed to exhibit a low degree of activation. However, active labour market policies have a long tradition in both countries. This paper analyses the development of active labour market policy in Germany and Austria during the last two decades with special emphasis on recent reform attempts. Against this background, the potential outcome of the central reforms is discussed. In spite of claims to ‘modernise’ the welfare system and labour market policies, current developments work mainly in the direction of curtailing benefits and rights of the unemployed.

A Treatise on the Family

Abstract: A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

The Political Economy of Active Labor-Market Policy:

Abstract: Active labor-market policies (ALMPs) have developed significantly over the past two decades across Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, with substantial cross-national differences in terms of both extent and overall orientation. The objective of this article is to account for cross-national variation in this policy field. It starts by reviewing existing scholarship concerning political, institutional, and ideational determinants of ALMPs. It then argues that ALMP is too broad a category to be used without further specification, and it develops a typology of four different types of ALMPs: incentive reinforcement, employment assistance, occupation, and human capital investment. These are discussed and examined through ALMP expenditure profiles in selected countries. The article uses this typology to analyze ALMP trajectories in six Western European countries and shows that the role of this instrument changes dramatically over time. It concludes that there is little regular...

The Politics of Post-Industrial Welfare States : Adapting Post-War Social Policies to New Social Risks

Abstract: Part 1: Politics of the New Social Risk 1. New Social Risks and the Politics of Post-Industrial Social Policies 2. Political Parties and New Social Risks: The Double Backlash against Social Democracy and Christian Democracy 3. New Social Risk and Political Preferences 4. Public Attitudes and New Social Risk Reform 5. Reconciling Competing Claims of the Welfare State Clientele 6. The Politics of Old and New Social Risk Coverage in Comparative Perspective 7. Trade Union Movements in Post-Industrial Welfare States. Opening up to New Social Interests? 8. Combatting Old and New Social Risks Part 2: Patterns of Policy Adaption 9. New Social Risks and Pension Reform in Germany and Sweden: The Politics of Pension Rights for Child Care 10. New Labour Market Risks and the Revision of Unemployment Protection Systems in Europe 11. Child Care Policies in Diverse European Welfare States: Switzerland, Sweden, France and Britain 12. Providing Coverage against New Social Risks in Bismarckian Welfare States: The Case of Long Term Care 13. The EU and New Social Risks: The Need for a Differentiated Evaluation

Between workfare and enablement – The different paths to transformation of the welfare state: A comparative analysis of activating labour market policies

Abstract: . The concepts that address different paths to transformation of the welfare state as a ‘workfare’, an ‘enabling’ or an ‘activating’ state share the idea that traditional welfare policies, mostly aiming at decommodification, are more and more replaced by social policies emphasising (re-)commodification. Activating labour market policy therefore is supposed to play a central role within the paradigm shift of welfare state policies. It is understood to involve a mix of the enforcement of labour market participation, the conditioning of rights and growing obligations of the individual at one side, and an increase of services in order to promote employability and restore social equity at the other. In this article, the different perceptions of the workfare and the enabling state perspectives on the positive and negative aspects of activating policies are reconstructed as ‘pure forms’ in order to obtain theoretical standards against which the empirical cases of activating labour market policies in Denmark, the United Kingdom and Germany are characterised and compared. The actual reform path is described by a combination of two indicators: the strength of the workfare and the strength of the enabling elements of the activating labour market policies. The evidence on activating labour market reforms confirms that in both dimensions a move in the same direction is taking place, but without producing growing convergence. Different welfare state types keep on producing different mixes of workfare and enabling policies, leading to very different levels of decommodification and (re-)commodification. Thus, an ongoing divergence of policies also exists within the new paradigm of an activating labour market policy, although single countries seem to change their alignment to a particular welfare state type.

Development and Crisis of the Welfare State: Parties and Policies in Global Markets. By Evelyne Huber and John D. Stephens. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. 368p. $54.00 cloth, $18.00 paper.

Abstract: This is surely the most ambitious and the most accomplished study of affluent post-World War II democratic welfare states. It uses statistical, case study, and comparative historical methods to describe and explain the course of social welfare policy over the second half of the twentieth century in 16 nations. Quantitatively, the study examines social insurance and service programs, major public expenditure and revenue aggregates, and an array of fine-grained indicators of state redistributive and safety net outcomes, from 1960 through 1994. Somewhat more qualitatively, the study extends its reach to encompass job and gender, labor market, and educational policies over the whole 1945–1996 period. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods of explanatory analysis, the work assesses various accounts of welfare state development and crisis, in particular, its authors' institutionally amplified, class-analytical political resource theory.