War and the adoption of family allowances

Abstract Many Western countries first introduced family allowances around the Second World War. We argue that this clustering is not coincidental and put pronatalist policies related to war preparation and the socioeconomic and demographic ramifications of the Second World War at the center of our explanation. To test this, we first conduct brief case studies of France, Germany, Italy, and Japan to detail how war preparation influenced the introduction of such family allowances. Second, a panel regression of 18 Western countries investigates the different factors contributing to the timing of introduction of such policies and shows that war and its aftershocks have been an important causal factor in the introduction of family allowances. It was not so much the destructiveness of and the involvement in the war that played a role, but rather a general wartime crisis that affected belligerent and non-belligerent countries in similar ways.