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.
In this paper, we analyse the transition to the labor market of participants in vocational training in Madeira in Portugal. The analysis is in two stages. First, we investigate how the employment status at different dates (1 month, 1 year, and 2 years after the completion of the training program) depends on relevant variables, such as age, gender, education and the content and duration of the training. Second, we use individuals' selfassessment of the effectiveness of the training program along three dimensions: employment, job-related skills and productivity. The respondents score training activities high on every dimension. Moreover, we find that training is more effective among the educated, indicating that vocational training is far from being remedial. We also find that long training programs and training related to tourism are particularly effective.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.