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This study provides a review of the concept of family ties. It then measures family ties in an unprecedentedly all-encompassing way, accounting for the individual 
eterogeneity (by context, gender, education and age) that may affect them, looking at the patterns of variation among the different dimensions. Indeed, a large number of indicators have been used in the literature to measure family ties, but the inter-relation among their dimensions has rarely been explicitly taken into account. Furthermore, family ties have been assumed to be invariant among different individuals, without any formal test of this assumption. The analysis is based on Italian National Statistical Office (ISTAT) survey on family and social subjects (FFS 2016) on 24,753 individuals. A Structural Equation Model (SEM) is used to measure the different family tie dimensions and to test their invariance by individual characteristics. The results bring out seven dimensions of family ties. These dimensions are invariant by context and gender, but not by education and age. These findings offer a clear picture of the concept of family ties and show how this concept is differently perceived on the basis of some ascribed and some acquired personal characteristics.

We study the joint design of nonlinear income and education taxes when the government pursues redistributive objectives. A key feature of our setup is that the ability type of an agent can affect both the costs and benefits of acquiring education. Market remuneration of agents depends on both their innate ability type and their educational choices. Our focus is on the properties of constrained efficient allocations when educational choices are publicly observable at the individual level, but earned income is subject to misreporting. We find that income-misreporting (IM) affects the optimal distortions on income and education and shed light on the reasons for it and mechanisms through which it is done. We show how and why IM strengthens the case for downward distorting the educational choices of low-ability agents. Finally, we find that IM provides another mechanism that makes commodity taxation useful.

The paper gives an update to earlier analysis considering youth poverty and transition to adulthood, which is timely given the economic crisis engulfing many countries in Europe. Whereas, the crisis is affecting young people in particular, there is also huge variation across Europe. We document the short-term consequences of the current recession on the transition to adulthood of young Europeans, focusing on two main cornerstones in the transition to adulthood: economic independence and residential autonomy. We show an almost universal increase in financial hardship experienced by young adults during the recession, which is starting to translate into higher rates of co-residence with parents, hence delaying the process of leaving home and gaining economic independence. The economic recession will have a huge impact on young people and their the transition to adulthood. Economic deprivation and uncertainty will most likely delay the key markers of transition to adulthood.

People's childbearing intentions change over the course of their reproductive lives. These changes have been conceptualised as occurring in response to the realisation that an individual is unlikely to achieve his or her intended fertility, because of constraints such as the biological clock or lack of a partner. In this paper we find that changes to childbearing plans are actually influenced by a much wider range of factors than this. People change their plans in response to the wishes of their partners, in response to social norms, as the result of re-partnering, and as the result of learning about the costs and benefits of parenthood; there are also differences between the factors which influence men's and women's decision-making. A key feature of this paper is that, in a departure from existing studies in this area, we use a flexible analytical framework which enables us to analyse increases in planned fertility separately from decreases. This allows us to uncover several complexities of the decision-making process which would otherwise be hidden, and leads us to conclude that the determinants of increases in planned fertility are not simply equal and opposite to the determinants of decreases.