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This paper assesses to what extent differences in the characteristics of individuals (micro‐level perspective) and country‐specific factors (macro‐level perspective) can explain country differences with respect to material deprivation levels. Thus, our work aims to simultaneously consider the macro dimension and the predominantly individually‐oriented study field of material deprivation using multilevel techniques. We make use of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions. Our results show that country‐specific factors seem to be much more relevant than individual effects in explaining country differences in material deprivation. We estimate that the introduction of country‐specific factors reduces the proportion of total variance due to between‐country differences in deprivation by 72.7 percent, while individual‐level variables reduce this proportion by only 9.4 percent. We also show, through interaction variables, that the effect of sociodemographic characteristics can be shaped by institutional and structural factors, especially by the level of GDP.

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In this paper, we examine the ability of social benefits to soften the level of child deprivation.We construct a dedicated child deprivation indicator which allows us to better capture children's circumstances and examine the effect on it of contextual and sociodemographic factors jointly through multilevel models. We contribute to the scarce literature on the effects of social spending on child-specific deprivation from a cross-national perspective. We separately estimate the effect of each social benefit function on child deprivation to evaluate the impact of those benefit functions directly targeted at children and those benefit functions with no explicit intention of child deprivation protection. Our findings suggest that in order to explain differences across European countries in the level of child deprivation, country-level determinants are crucial. Moreover, social benefits play a key role that remains even when controlling for country-level determinants. An additional finding is that the most effective social benefit functions are not necessarily those targeted at children.

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The overeducation literature has typically assumed that the effect of overeducation on wages is constant across the conditional wage distribution. in this paper we use quantile regression and data from a group of European countries to show that differences across segments of the distribution are indeed large. We find significant differences between sexes, in the sense that it is not true that in countries where men are penalised more severely, women are also severely penalised. moreover, different trends are observed depending on the country and sex. for example in Germany, the wage penalty for overeducation is higher among women than men. furthermore, while the wage penalty for men increases from decile 10 to decile 90, the wage penalty decreases for women. in spain, women are more severely penalised for overeducation than men and the effect of overeducation is quite homogeneous across deciles for both men and women. AdditionAl Keywordsconditional distribution of Wages, European community Household panel, pay-penalty, Quantile regression, unobservable Variables. resumenEn la literatura relacionada con la sobre-educación, es tradicional asumir que el impacto de dicha sobreeducación en los salarios es común a toda la distribución de salarios. En este artículo, con datos de un grupo de países europeos y utilizando la regresión cuantílica se demuestra que, de hecho, el impacto de la sobreeducación es diferente en los distintos segmentos de la distribución de salarios. las diferencias de género y por país son también significativas. así por ejemplo en alemania, la penalización salarial de los sobreeducados es mayor entre las mujeres que entre los hombres, pero mientras para los hombres la penalización es mayor en los deciles superiores, para las mujeres la penalización es mayor en los deciles inferiores. En España, las mujeres son más severamente penalizadas por estar sobre-educadas que los hombres, siendo constante dicha penalización salarial a lo largo de la distribución de salarios. 1 We would like to thank the participants in the seminar at the university of Granada and EalE 2006 in prague for their comments and suggestions. santiago budría is grateful for the funding provided under the EdWin project HpsE-cT-2002-00108 of the European commission and the fcT of the ministry of science and Education of portugal. ana i. moro-Egido thanks the centre for andalusian studies and project sEJ2006-11067/Econ of the spanish ministry of Education and science for their funding.

As recession and financial crisis spread across Europe an increasing number of people are at risk of poverty and social exclusion. Children are more exposed to the risk of poverty and social exclusion than the overall population of the EU. The current climate of economic downturn calls out for an urgent need to break the vicious circle of intergenerational transmission of poverty and social exclusion in order to improve the well-being of children in a systematic and integrated way. Using the EU-SILC 2009 module on deprivation, this paper aims to contribute to the literature on poverty and social exclusion by analysing the determinants of material deprivation among children. Special attention is given to the type of household children belong to, a characteristic that is strongly determined by adults' behaviour. We find that the level of child deprivation varies among household types. Moreover, we confirm that even after controlling for the socio-economic characteristics of the household and parents, there still exist households with a lack of certain items that are strongly correlated to children with intense deprivation. Therefore, we can conclude that there exists an association between child deprivation and the household-deprivation profile that surpasses the socio-demographic characteristics of the household and parents.JEL CODES: I32, J13