Suchergebnisse

Pathways through the life course have undergone considerable change in recent years. Compared to previous generations, young adults today have a much wider range of choices and opportunities, as well as constraints, than in the past. Some of these changes are the result of demographic shifts, such as declining fertility rates, declining marriage rates and increased rates of cohabitation and divorce. Others are the result of shifts in the labour market, the expansion of the educational system, globalization and technological change which have opened up new opportunities and constraints that impact the individual life course and patterns of family formation and dissolution. This book presents findings of longitudinal analyses examining these transitions, from leaving home to retirement, the ways in which individuals and couples negotiate and organise the competing demands of paid and unpaid work during their lives, and the consequences of these arrangements for the division of labour, educational attainment and occupational achievements.

Pathways through the life course have changed considerably in recent decades. Many of our assumptions about leaving home, starting new relationships and having children have been turned upside down. It is now almost as common to have children prior to marriage as afterwards, and certainly much more common to live together before marrying than to marry without first living together. Women are more likely to remain in the labour force after having children and many families struggle with problems of work-family balance at some stage in their lives, particularly when they have young children. But how much has really changed? Is there really more diversity in how individuals transition through these life course stages, or just variations at the margin with most people following a standard work and family life course? This volume makes use of rich longitudinal data from a unique Australian project to examine these issues. Drawing on broader theories of social change and demographic transitions in an international context, each chapter provides a detailed empirical assessment of the ways in which Australian adults negotiate their work and family lives. In doing so, the volume provides important insight into the ways in which recent demographic, social and economic changes both challenge and reproduce gender divisions.

A long acknowledged but seldom addressed problem with political communication experiments concerns the use of captive participants. Study participants rarely have the opportunity to choose information themselves, instead receiving whatever information the experimenter provides. We relax this assumption in the context of an over-time framing experiment focused on opinions about health care policy. Our results dramatically deviate from extant understandings of over-time communication effects. Allowing individuals to choose information themselves—a common situation on many political issues—leads to the preeminence of early frames and the rejection of later frames. Instead of opinion decay, we find dogmatic adherence to opinions formed in response to the first frame to which participants were exposed (i.e., staunch opinion stability). The effects match those that occur when early frames are repeated multiple times. The results suggest that opinion stability may often reflect biased information seeking. Moreover, the findings have implications for a range of topics including the micro–macro disconnect in studies of public opinion, political polarization, normative evaluations of public opinion, the role of inequality considerations in the debate about health care, and, perhaps most importantly, the design of experimental studies of public opinion.

This dissertation is a collection of essays in two areas of financial stability. The first part deals with systemic risk in the banking sector. First, it asks whether countercyclical macroprudential policy tools can be an effective way of reducing cyclicality in bank lending. The main finding is that these policies can be counterproductive and may incentivize more intertwined banks, and hence, endanger financial stability. The next paper investigates, and provides some evidence of, the possibility that banks actively change their portfolios in order to influence the likelihood of joint bank failure. The second part of this dissertation studies the connection between public finance and financial stability. Chapter 4 looks into the interaction between bank capital regulation and taxation and finds that banks trade off leverage risk against portfolio risk in response to a higher corporate income tax rates. Finally, Chapter 5 analyses banks' excessive holdings of domestic government debt as one of the sources of the interrelatedness of public finance and bank stability. Two possible explanations of banks' home bias are tested: voluntary government bond hoarding and government induced bond buying.

AbstractIn this paper, we devise a stochastic asset–liability management (ALM) model for a life insurance company and analyze its influence on the balance sheet within a low-interest rate environment. In particular, a flexible procedure for the generation of insurers' compressed contract portfolios that respects the given biometric structure is presented, extending the existing literature on stochastic ALM modeling. The introduced balance sheet model is in line with the principles of double-entry bookkeeping as required in accounting. We further focus on the incorporation of new business, i.e. the addition of newly concluded contracts and thus of insured in each period. Efficient simulations are obtained by integrating new policies into existing cohorts according to contract-related criteria. We provide new results on the consistency of the balance sheet equations. In extensive simulation studies for different scenarios regarding the business form of today's life insurers, we utilize these to analyze the long-term behavior and the stability of the components of the balance sheet for different asset–liability approaches. Finally, we investigate the robustness of two prominent investment strategies against crashes in the capital markets, which lead to extreme liquidity shocks and thus threaten the insurer's financial health.

The generally accepted view is that to achieve macroeconomic stability and sustainable economic growth, good management of public finance is necessary. The concept of external audit of public finance, as a subject of research in this paper, is analyzed as an integral element of public financial management system, which significantly determines transparent, responsible, and stable functioning of the public sector in any economy. In accordance with the subject, the goal of the research is to emphasize the importance of external audit of the execution of budget at all levels of government in the process of achieving and maintaining macroeconomic stability, with a special focus on the Republic of Serbia. Recognizing the complexity of this subject matter, qualitative methodology is applied, based on the dominant application of method of analytical description. The paper concludes that external audit of public finance has potential effects on the reduction of budget deficit and public debt. Given that ministries and other state administration bodies know that their financial reports can be audited at any time, external audit has a preventive effect in terms of awareness-raising for greater responsibility with managing public funds. Furthermore, recommendations of the State Audit Institution, to the extent that they are implemented, contribute to saving and efficient use of resources in certain areas. This work is licensed under aCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.