This study examined the association between supportive and adverse aspects of the child–parent relationship in childhood (parental understanding and exposure to parental physical abuse, respectively) and providing care to a parent with health limitations among middle-aged and older adults. It explores whether these associations vary across broad macro-geographical regions, through the prism of the Informal Care Model. Data were drawn from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), Waves 7 and 9. The subsamples comprised respondents aged 50 years and older, 2,970 with an unhealthy mother and 890 with an unhealthy father. The degree of maternal understanding in childhood was positively associated with providing care to a mother, but not to a father. Frequency of parental physical abuse (for mothers and fathers) was unrelated to providing care. Interaction analyses indicated regional variations in associations between maternal physical abuse and providing care to mothers, and between paternal understanding and providing care to fathers. Taken together, providing care was more strongly associated with childhood relationship characteristics in regions typically characterized by more established long-term care policies and weaker familistic norms. The findings underscore the need to support adult children care-givers, particularly those who perceived their childhood relationship with their parent as negative. Support efforts may be especially important in contexts where care-giving relies more heavily on family resources and formal long-term care is more limited. Further research should focus on differences in the mechanisms linking early parent–child relationships to care-giving for mothers versus fathers.

We run an experiment in which students of different European nationalities are matched in groups of five and repeatedly choose with whom within their group they want to play a trust game. Participants observe of each other age, gender, nationality and number of siblings. The region of origin, “North” or “South” is a major determinant of success in the experiment. Participants tend to trust those they trusted before and who trusted them. We do not find evidence of regional discrimination per se. It is only the underlying and significant differences in behavior that translate through repeated interactions into differences in payoffs between the two regions.

The impact of trust on economic performance has been widely explored, but the reasons for its variability across countries are not well understood. We analyse the effect of the quality of government at the regional level on individual generalized trust in a multi-country context across regions in Europe. Social phenomena are often subnational and a number of public services are provided at a subnational level; the trust of individuals living in the same country may, therefore, differ by region depending also on the quality of the local government. As a proxy of the quality of institutions, we use the European Quality of Government Index, calculated at the regional level over 27 European Union (EU) countries. The analysis conducted on data extracted from the European Social Survey 2012 refers to 142 regions from 15 EU member states. Considering the clustered nature of the data, a multilevel approach is used. The findings show that living in a region with high-quality local government positively influences individual trust. This positive association survives the inclusion of several contextual regional variables.