Agar Brugiavini and Guglielmo Weber: Introduction; 1 Olympia Bover, Agar Brugiavini and Guglielmo Weber: Anatomy of Financial Hardship; 2 Orazio Attanasio, Agar Brugiavini, Elisabetta Trevisan and Guglielmo Weber: The Consequences of Financial Hardship and Recessions on Income and Welfare; 3 Orazio Attanasio, Margherita Borella and Torben Heien Nielsen: Characterizing Income Shocks and their Transmission to Household Consumption; 4 Agar Brugiavini and Guglielmo Weber: Conclusions

The great recession is changing the way many people live and the way they perceive their prospects for the near and more distant future. Its longer term consequences will not be known for some time, but something can be learned from the effect on individuals and households who experienced financial hardship. This volume is the first to use innovative survey data on the lives of Europeans to investigate the long term impact of financial hardship on earnings, standards of living, and health. The data provide a detailed account of the key events that have taken place over the course of the recession. It compares the well-being of individuals who were lucky to escape negative shocks to their income or their circumstances to the less fortunate who may have lost their job, faced divorce, or serious illness. The wide array of welfare state and social support provisions across different European countries adds an important policy angle to the analysis: has the welfare state, currently under heavy pressure, been able to provide an adequate safety net in the face of extended periods of financial difficulties, or has the family instead proven the ultimate source of support in difficult times?

Agar Brugiavini is Professor of Economics at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. She is Director of the Ca' Foscari International College and Dean of the Venice International University -VIU. She is an International Research Fellow of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), London. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the London School of Economics. She was Visiting Professor at Northwestern University. She has contributed to many volumes of the NBER project Social Security Around the World. Her research interests include: the behaviour of individuals and households in the areas of consumption, saving and labour supply, pension reforms and insurance markets. She plays a key role in the SHARE (Survey of Health Ageing and Retirement in Europe). More recently she has been carrying out research on the economics of ageing, looking at the relationship between health conditions and economic behaviour, and also on gender economics.
Guglielmo Weber is Professor of Econometrics at University of Padua. He is a Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) Research Fellow and an International Research Fellow of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), London. He is director of the Centro Studi Economici Antonveneta (CSEA) and Executive Vice-President of the European Economic Association (EEA). He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the London School of Economics. He was visiting professor at Stanford University and Northwestern University (USA). His research interests include consumer behaviour, saving, retirement and the economics of ageing. He is involved in the SHARE project as Country Team Leader for Italy, and is vice coordinator of SHARE-ERIC (the European Research Infrastructure Consortium that manages SHARE).