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This work analyzes the impact of remittances on nutritional status of children aged <5 years old in Ecuador in 2006. Using a set of anthropometric indicators constructed according to the new World Health Organization standards, the last household survey available for this country, and an instrumental variables strategy controlling for endogeneity of remittances, this study finds a positive and significant effect of remittance income on short‐term and middle‐term child nutritional status; nevertheless, no significant impact on long‐run anthropometric indicators.

The aim of this work was to analyse the use of health care services by immigrants in Spain. Using a nationally representative health survey from 2006-2007 and negative binomial and hurdle models, it was found that there is no statistically significant difference in the patterns of visits to general practitioners and hospital stays between migrants and natives in Spain. However, immigrants have a lower access to specialists and visit emergency rooms with a higher frequency than nationals.

While citizen opinion polls reveal that Europeans are concerned about the labour market consequences of technological progress, our understanding of the actual significance of this association is still imperfect. In this article, the authors assess the relationship between robot adoption and employment in Europe. Combining industry-level data on employment by skill type with data on robot adoption and using different sets of fixed-effects techniques, the study finds that robot use is associated with an increase in aggregate employment. Contrary to some previous studies, the authors do not find evidence of robots reducing the share of low-skill workers across Europe. Since the overwhelming majority of industrial robots are used in manufacturing, the findings should not be interpreted outside of the manufacturing context. However, the results still hold when including non-manufacturing sectors and they are robust across a wide range of assumptions and econometric specifications.

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This study investigates the short-term impact on the quantity and quality of births of an abortion reform in Uruguay that legalised termination of pregnancy until the 12 week of pregnancy in the short run. We employ a differences-in-differences approach, comprehensive administrative records of births, and a novel identification strategy based on the planned or unplanned nature of pregnancies that came to term. Our results suggest that this policy change has led to an 8% decline in the number of births from unplanned pregnancies, driven by the group of mothers aged between 20 and 34 years old who have secondary education. This decline has triggered an increase in the average quality of births in terms of more intensive prenatal control care and a lower probability of births among single mothers. Furthermore, we document a positive selection process of births because of the reform, as adequate prenatal control care and Apgar scores rose among the affected demographic group.

This article presents for the first time a comparative study of the cost of disability for households in 31 European countries. In order to do so, we exploit the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions, its special module on housing conditions for 2007 and 2012 and employ two alternative methodologies, one based on how difficult it is for households to make ends meet and the other related to the access of households to a set of services and assets. The comparative nature of the present analysis shows these national estimates of the cost disability from a broader perspective than previous research. One important finding of this study is that there is a significant diversity in the cost of disability across European countries, with Scandinavian countries at the top of the ranking and Eastern European states at the bottom. We discuss some possible explanatory reasons for the pattern of costs across countries found in our analysis.