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The article examines the interplay between welfare state regimes and the distribution of welfare between generations.

Using data from 2017 for 24 European countries on six standard of living dimensions, the authors investigate the intergenerational welfare distribution in a two-stage procedure: (1) the authors compare the intergenerational welfare distribution across welfare state regimes using their existing typologies and find a moderate nexus. Therefore, (2) the authors employ clustering procedure to look for a new classification that would better reflect the cross-country variation in the intergenerational welfare division.

The authors find a complex relationship between the welfare state model and welfare distribution across generations and identify the policy patterns that shape it. Continental and liberal regimes are quite similar in these terms and favour the elderly generation. Social-democratic and CEE regimes seem to be a bit more balanced. COVID-19 pandemic will probably increase the intergenerational imbalance in terms of welfare distribution in favour of the elderly.

In contrast to the majority of previous studies, which employ inputs (social expenditures) or outputs (benefits, incomes), the authors use intergenerational balance indicators reflecting living conditions of a given generation as compared to the reference point defined as an average situation of all generations.

This study aims to test the unemployment hysteresis hypothesis for Nordic countries by considering age and gender differentials at various frequencies.

First, the authors test the linearity of the unemployment series and apply appropriate unit root tests based on the linearity test results. The authors use these tests for both original and wavelet-decomposed unemployment rates.

The authors' findings indicate that the results obtained from the original and decomposed series differ. While the authors find evidence of unemployment hysteresis in the six unemployment rates in the short run, they observe supportive results for hysteresis in the three unemployment rates in the long run.

The authors take into account different age and gender groups. Furthermore, the authors propose a testing strategy for unemployment hysteresis that considers the nonlinearity and structural breaks in unemployment rates. Finally, the authors determine whether the unemployment hysteresis is valid at various frequencies.

This paper aims to explore the existence of convergence in non-monetary working conditions in Europe resorting to widely used definitions of this phenomenon and composite indexes of job quality.

The analysis relies on composite indexes, widely used in previous literature, for 207 regions in six different areas of job quality drawing on the microdata of the European Working Conditions Survey from 1995 to 2015. This study assesses the occurrence of convergence both in terms of dispersion of job quality outcomes (sigma-convergence) and, especially, regarding the existence of a catch-up process (beta-convergence).

This study finds evidence of both types of convergences in all the domains, with the exception of skills and discretion and prospects dimensions according to the sigma-convergence approach. The results do not suggest substantial differences between the 15 European Union countries before the 2004 enlargement and the new Member States and are robust to a wide range of changes in the sample and different econometric specifications.

Tot he best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper represents the first rigorous and systematic attempt of addressing the existence of convergence in non-monetary working conditions, applying formal and widely accepted definitions of this phenomenon. It contributes to our knowledge on this topic providing strong evidence of convergence in job quality. Those results can be of interest for scholars in Economics and other Social Sciences.