NRN Labor and Welfare State

National Research Network S103 is funded by the Austrian Science Fund.

The Austrian Center for Labor Economics and the Analysis of the Welfare State represents an international research center in labor, population and welfare economics. It aims at producing high quality research in the area of labor markets and welfare state programs.

Principal Investigator is Prof. Dr. Rudolf Winter-Ebmer from the University of Linz.

'Population Economics' is a subproject of the research network 'Labor Economics and the Analysis of the Welfare State'.
Prof. Dr. Josef Zweimüller was leader of the subproject that was conducted at the Department of Economics in Zurich.
A first goal of the subproject 'Population Economics' was to study the question whether family policies will have an impact on fertility and whether current policies – by affecting labor supply, labor demand, and earnings – help (or hinder) to improve the balance between work and childcare. In the short and medium run, immigration is an obvious instrument to ensure the presence of a sufficiently large labor force. A second goal of the subproject 'Population Economics' was to understand how immigration affects take-up of welfare state provisions by immigrants and to study in more detail how immigration affects local labor markets.