Suchergebnisse

This volume asks whether there was a common structure, ideology, and image of the household in the medieval Christian West. In the period under examination, noble households often exercised great power in their own right, while even quite humble households were defined as agents of government in the administration of local communities

"Households and Financialization in Europe develops a processual, relational and critical transdisciplinary approach to household financialization in Europe, utilizing a range of national and local case studies. It does so by drawing on debates in Marxist, feminist and radical IPE, anthropology and other fields. The book explores the household as simultaneously a micro-level social institution specializing in social reproduction, distribution and other activities, a building bloc of larger economic and social structures, and an object of multiple systems of power/knowledge. Putting this conceptualization to use in original research, the authors identify geographically and historically situated ways in which financialization transforms households and their relationships with the wider economy and society. The book traces these transformations in case studies of variegated financialization in Eastern and Southern European (semi-) peripheries where households have faced particularly severe financial issues since the global financial crisis, such as over-indebtedness and asset devaluation. Key themes recurring throughout the book include: the key role of housing in household financialization; the co-constitutive relationship between financialization and social and spatial inequalities; specific patterns in the relations of financial actors and households in semi-peripheries; and the implications of semi-peripheral forms of real and financial accumulation for household financialization. With its transdisciplinary approach, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of finance, financialization, household economics, international and global political economy, and uneven development."

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to analyze whether and to what extent households living in southern Europe, i.e. Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy, experience similar conditions of financial vulnerability, considering that in comparative research these countries are often grouped together because of the substantial instability of their economies and the similarity of social and welfare model.Design/methodology/approachThe authors use data from Household Finance and Consumption Survey, a quite novel data set that covers the whole balance sheet of a sample of households. The authors compute four indicators of debt burden and in order to study households' risk of default the authors apply two-part model, which is a valuable alternative to the application of conventional regression models with zero-inflated data.FindingsAnalysis reveals that the burden of debts and the risk of default are very different among the four countries, in particular Spain and Portugal have the highest proportion of financially vulnerable households.Originality/valueThe study is one a few that have directly compared objectives indicators of households' financial vulnerability in all Southern European countries. Moreover, the authors employ a two-part model, a valuable alternative to the application of conventional logit or linear regression models. In the first part of the model the authors estimate the probability that households suffer financial vulnerability; in the second part, the authors estimate households' level of vulnerability only for vulnerable families.

The forms and processes of local-level social organisation seen today in fishing communities in northern Europe can be fully appreciated only after their history is recognized and explored. Until the middle of this century, the predominant form of organisation was the joint maritime household, which involved men and women in separate sets of collaborative activities. With changing technology, rising standards of living, and the intervention of the institutions of modernity, women everywhere in northern Europe have been able to disengage themselves from their former obligations, doing so largely in order to realise their aspirations for domestic independence. The men, however, continue to own their boats in partnerships and to pool their labour, drawing upon relationships of kinship, affinity, and neighbourhood as economic and social recnnrces

First comparative study of landless households brings out their major role in European history and society. The numbers of landless people - those lacking formal rights to land, or possessing only tiny smallholdings - grew rapidly across post-medieval Europe, as rural population and economic growth divided landowners and farmers from (increasingly) landless rural workers. But they have hitherto been relatively neglected, a gap which this volume, covering Scandinavia, Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium, Britain, France and Spain from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries, aims to fill, making creative use of a diverse range of unexplored sources. Instead of concentrating on the well-documented cases of landholding peasants, it explores the many different experiences of the numerous rural landless. It explains how their households were formed (often in the face of economic difficulties and official hostility), how all the members of a family contributed to its survival, how the landless related to other social groups and negotiated access to vital resources, and how they adapted as rural society was changed by war, politics, agrarian and industrial development, government policy and welfare systems.

<p>Using the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), this study investigated how health is associated with households' portfolio choices in 10 European countries. This study reports three important findings on the relationship between health and portfolio choices. First, households in poor health condition are less likely than households in good health to own various types of financial and non-financial assets. Second, households in poor health condition tend to allocate a lower share of their wealth to risky financial assets, savings for long-term investment, their principal residence, and other non-financial assets while they allocate a larger share to liquid assets such as bank deposits. Third, there exists a regional variation in the magnitude of the correlation between health and portfolio choices. This regional variation can be explained by differences in health care systems. Overall, these findings suggest that negative health shocks are significantly associated with a household's portfolio choices.</p>

This Working Paper examines the relationship between household composition and several measures of income sufficiency, including two measures of relative poverty and two measures of subjective hardship. Data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) are used to calculate the risk of poverty and hardship by household type for all countries in the EU. It is found that whereas the importance of different household types varies greatly between countries, the same household types are at the highest risk of poverty and hardship in virtually all countries: lone parents, single elderly people, and other single-adult households. However, while these at-risk groups account for a majority of the poor population across Northern and Western Europe, they account for only a minority of the poor population across Eastern and Southern Europe.

Two perspectives provide alternative insights into household composition in contemporary Eastern Europe. The first stresses that individuals have relatively fixed preferences about living arrangements and diverge from them only when they cannot attain their ideal. The second major approach, the adaptive strategies perspective, predicts that individuals have few preferences. Instead, they use household composition to cope with economic hardship, deploy labor, or care for children or the elderly. This article evaluates these approaches in five post‐socialist East‐European countries, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Russia, using descriptive statistics and logistic regression. The results suggest that household extension is common in these countries and provide the most evidence for the adaptive strategies perspective. In particular, the results show that variables operationalizing the adaptive strategies perspective, including measures of single motherhood, retirement status, agricultural cultivation, and poverty, increase the odds of household extension.

The 2008 crisis had a significant impact on household employment in some European countries. An analysis of the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions generated a new cross-national typology of household employment structures and showed how these changed during the crisis and austerity period, capturing the experiences of high and low qualified households. Findings indicate that dual earning households are not always a consequence of gender equality but result from economic necessity or employment opportunities. The re-emergence of traditional male breadwinner households is often the result of female unemployment, especially for lower educated women. An increase in female single earners and workless households is evident in countries hit hardest by the employment crisis. The value of this cross-national typology, rooted in the interaction of educational effects and employment opportunities, is allowing comparison both within and between European countries, going beyond established typologies based on policy frameworks or gender cultures.

The 2008 crisis had a significant impact on household employment in some European countries. An analysis of the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions generated a new cross-national typology of household employment structures and showed how these changed during the crisis and austerity period, capturing the experiences of high and low qualified households. Findings indicate that dual earning households are not always a consequence of gender equality but result from economic necessity or employment opportunities. The re-emergence of traditional male breadwinner households is often the result of female unemployment, especially for lower educated women. An increase in female single earners and workless households is evident in countries hit hardest by the employment crisis. The value of this cross-national typology, rooted in the interaction of educational effects and employment opportunities, is allowing comparison both within and between European countries, going beyond established typologies based on policy frameworks or gender cultures.

By focusing on morphological continuity, family historians may be neglecting long-term changes within the family that are documented in non-numerical sources. Evidence from Finland suggests that researchers need to reexamine the history of the suurperhe ("large family"). Similarly, evidence from the Scandinavian peninsula suggests that the early modern centuries witnessed the growth of privacy in generational relations, the emergence of the father-son dyad as the preferred method of land transfer, the separation of landownership from household authority, and the use of the courts to solve family problems. Thus there may have been transformations in family life in the long term that unchanging measures of mean size do not capture.