BACKGROUND Participation in population-based preventive health check has declined over the past decades. More research is needed to determine factors enhancing participation. The objective of this study was to examine the association between two measures of neighborhood level social capital on participation in the health check phase of a population-based lifestyle intervention. METHODS The st...

This paper discusses the elements of socialist and post-socialist (un)employment and informal economy. A growing economic crisis and a reduced participation in the formal labor market in the newly-formed Croatian state in the early 1990s brought about an increase in unemployment and gave rise to informal economy. However, informal economy had been widespread even before, in the late socialist p...

This paper uses household data to test whether microfinance institutions created by the Malawian government in the mid-1990s under its Poverty Alleviation Programme crowded out access to informal loans. As in several recent studies, the paper adopts policy evaluation techniques to identify a causal relationship between access to government-sponsored credit programmes and informal loans. After t...

Social connections in the community ("social capital") represent an important source of resilience in the aftermath of major disasters. However, little is known about how residential relocation due to housing destruction affects survivors' social capital. We examined changes in social capital among survivors of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. People who lost their homes were r...

This article examines the participation of Spanish older people in formal, non-formal and informal learning activities and presents a profile of participants in each kind of learning activity. Method: We used data from a nationally representative sample of Spanish people between 60 and 75 years old (n = 4703). The data were extracted from the 2007 Encuesta sobre la Participación de la Población...

In the United States, charitable contributions can be deducted from taxable income making the price of giving inversely related to the marginal tax rate. However, several other types of contributions such as donations to political organizations are not tax deductible. This paper investigates the spillover effects of charitable subsidies on political giving using five independent surveys of char...

Formalised public participation in project approval procedures is rarely addressed in technology assessment. Empirical data about public participation processes are taken into account even more rarely. This article explores the practice of public participation in infrastructure projects in the Federal Republic of Germany on the basis of empirical data from the period of 1990 to 2010. The author...

In Germany, informal home care is preferred to professional care services in the public discussion as well as in legal care regulations. However, they ascribe only minor importance to the opportunity costs care givers have to face. Therefore, this paper explores the infl uence home care has on the labor supply of carers who live together with their care recipient. I am using the German Socio-Ec...