The impact of education on third births. A multilevel discrete-time hazard analysis

We propose to use multilevel discrete-time hazard models to assess the impact of societal and individual level covariates on the timing and occurrence of third births. We focus mainly on the impact of educational attainment on third births across 15 European countries. From the analysis in this paper, the effect of education on the propensity to have a third child is found to be negative. This education effect is not significantly weakened by the Nordic countries, but living in Scandinavia does increase the hazard for a third birth.     

Did the escalation of the financial crisis of 2008 affect the perception of immigration-related threats? A natural experiment

In this paper, we apply a natural experiment approach, comparing specific data from the European Values Study prior to and after the escalation of the financial crisis in 2008. The aim is to disentangle the short-term effect of the crisis on the relationship between social vulnerability and immigrant-related threat perceptions for the residents of Luxembourg (natives and foreign nationals). Propensity score matching is used to ensure the balanced composition of the control group and treated group with regard to the observed covariates. The results reveal that vulnerable foreign nationals demonstrated lower perceptions of immigration-related threats after the escalation of the crisis than their pre-crisis counterparts. No significant effect of the escalation of the crisis was found among Luxembourg nationals.     

Long Term Trends in Life Satisfaction, 1973–2012: Flanders in Europe

In this paper we focus on temporal heterogeneity of overall life satisfaction. Using repeated Eurobarometer Surveys from the period 1973–2012 and multilevel hierarchical age period cohort regression, trend, life-cycle and cohort effects are disentangled. In Flanders, the trend fluctuations are stronger than the life-cycle effects and there are hardly any generation effects. In other countries, by contrast, there are few or no trend fluctuations, but rather signs of a generational change. The international heterogeneity is particularly large and these international differences are stronger than the temporal ones. It remains unclear what factors from the macro-context lie at the basis of the observed international differences.