News & Events
The impact of obesity on human capital accumulation: Exploring the driving factors
Abstract This paper examines the impact of childhood obesity on Spanish high school students’ academic achievement and human capital accumulation. To address potential endogeneity concerns, we exploit exogenous variation in obesity within peer groups, using data from friendship networks. Specifically, we instrument individual obesity with the average body mass index of intransitive friendship triads. Our…
NEW OPEN ACCESS PUBLICATION
Lifecycle analysis of the gender gap in paid and unpaid work by household structure Abstract The paper provides new insights into men and women’s lifetime contributions to the overall economy and societal well-being, taking both market and non-market activities into account. It extends the National Transfer Accounts (NTA) and National Time Transfer Accounts (NTTA) methodologies…
The Impact of Ageing, Socio-economic Differences and the Evolution of Morbidity on Future Health Expenditure – a Dynamic Microsimulation
Researchers from the WIFO team have released a new publication about the impact of population ageing on healthcare expenditure. They use dynamic microsimulation to project healthcare expenditure in Austria and disentangle the effects of changes in longevity, population age-structure, healthy life years and socio-economic health disparities. By combining price weights for healthcare services with information…
External Effects of the Pension System in the Context of the Welfare State
This paper provides results from different studies conducted by the Gemma Abio, Ció Patxot (UB) and Guadalupe Souto (UAB) and other authors aiming at measuring the external effects generated by the existence of an intergenerational transfer system, such as the pension system, and the welfare state as a whole. The primary reason for the presence…
Microdata in Macromodels
Martin Spielauer and Philipp Warum from WIFO participated in the MacroABM 2nd Workshop last 29-30 April celebrated at Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU). The workshop brought together researchers from diverse modelling perspectives, including ABM, HANK, and microsimulations, to encourage collaboration across currently disconnected fields and explore challenges and innovative solutions in using microdata…
International Odyssey Conference on Economics and Business
University of Ljubljana researchers participated in the 16th International Odyssey Conference on Economics and Business celebrated in Dubrovnik (Coatia) from 7th to 10th May 2025, organised by the Faculty of Economics and Business (University of Zagreb, Croatia). The Conference gathers together researchers and practitioners to discuss about the latest challenges in the field of business…
Intergenerational arrangements on the European welfare model
This first Policy Brief provides a general introduction to the opportunities and challenges of an ageing population faced by the EU and the contribution that SUSTAINWELL will make in the development of policy thinking. It is primarily intended – although not exclusively – to decision makers. It includes a general introduction to the research methodologies…
Life course heterogeneity and the future labour force: A dynamic microsimulation analysis for Austria
Using Austria as a case study, this paper demonstrates how capturing life course heterogeneity improves the accuracy and policy relevance of socio-demographic projections, and how considering this population heterogeneity impacts labour force dynamics and economic dependency ratios. The authors introduce and apply the microsimulation model microDEMS, focusing on education, migration background, health and labour market…
NTA help to foster a better balance between family, market and government in approaching welfare
SUSTAINWELL coordinator, Prof. Cio Patxot and researchers, Gemma Abio (UB), Guadalupe Souto (UAB), Robert Gal (HDRI) and Bernhard Binder-Hammer (OEAW) attended last week the 15th Global NTA Meeting on Population and the Generational Economy. SUSTAINWELL researchers participated and presented their research in: The project coordinator was also invited to partake in the Bridging NTA to National Inclusion Accounts…
Gender income gap in the EU
The ILO has estimated that the gender income gap – which is the ratio of women’s to men’s labour income – is 62,3% in 2024 and has only changed minimally over the last decade. Source: Own elaboration based on ILO modelled estimates, March 2025 Within SUSTAINWELL, we take a wider perspective of the gender gap in a lifecycle perspective…
Paying £1 or nothing in Dictator Games: Unexpected differences
The paper investigates the case of social preferences: do hypothetical rewards elicit different social behaviour than real but small monetary rewards in online experiments? To answer this more precisely, the Universidad Loyola Andalucia team have conducted an online Dictator Game experiment in which 1,195 participants decided how to split £1 with another participant (63% female, average…
The Elderly Bias of the Spanish Welfare State (1958–2012)
The Spanish welfare state is strongly biased toward sustaining the elderly’s welfare, rather than children’s. We study the evolution of that bias since 1958 through National Transfer Accounts (NTA). NTA disentangle how people produce, consume, and save along their life cycle, and how resources move among generations through different mechanisms (families, markets, and governments). We…