Trash contracts? The impact of temporary employment on leaving the parental home in Poland

Poland stands out in international comparisons as a country where leaving the parental home is remarkably delayed. There are many economic and institutional factors which contribute to postponement of residential independence among youth, such as housing shortages, limited availability of rental housing and limited social assistance for young people. However, there is little discussion in public debate about re-designing social policy support for youth or improving the situation on the housing market. What attracts attention instead is the role of flexibilisation of contractual arrangements on the Polish labour market. In media discourse, fixed-term contracts have been labelled as “trash contracts” and all the problems that young people in Poland face when making the transition to adulthood have been attributed to the spread of this specific employment form. This article aims to find out whether fixed-term contracts do indeed hinder residential independence of youth. Models of leaving the parental home are estimated based on panel data from EU-SILC. The results show no significant negative impact of temporary employment on the probability of establishing one’s own household among youth. What matters is whether young people have jobs at all, whereas the type of contract that they receive from employers seems to be of little importance

Dostosowanie sposobu organizacji czasu pracy do obowiązków rodzinnych w Polsce

This paper presents a diagnosis of reconciliation of work and parenthood in Poland based on the data from the European Labour Force Survey ad hoc module “Reconciliation between work and family life” carried out in 2010. These data provide information on the following options of combining work with parenthood duties: (1) part-time work (2) flexible arrangements of working time (3) distance work. We compare the conditions for combining work with parenthood duties in Poland with opportunities observed in other European countries. We also show to what extent the conditions for reconciliation of work and parenthood in Poland have improved in time. We make an overview of legal regulations related to combining work with childcare duties and indicate the opportunities for improvement of these policies

Poland: Fertility decline as a response to profound societal and labour market changes?

This article opens with a review of the main trends in family-related behaviour, i.e. fertility decline and changes in fertility patterns, a decreasing propensity to marry, postponement of marriage, and a slowly increasing frequency of divorces and separations. The analysis takes into account urban and rural differences. We then aim to identify the main determinants of family changes within the general conceptual framework of the Second Democratic Transition (SDT) in Poland. However, contrary to mainstream interpretations of the SDT, the main emphasis of this study is on the structural components of change, which need to be reformulated to account for processes specific to the transition to a market economy. The focus is, therefore, on labour market developments and family policy, and to a lesser extent on ideational change.childbearing, Europe, fertility, fertility decline, Poland

The effect of number of siblings on adult mortality: Evidence from Swedish registers for cohorts born between 1938 and 1972

Demographic research has paid much attention to the impact of childhood conditions on adult mortality. We focus on one of the key aspects of early life conditions, sibling group size, and examine the causal effect of growing up in a large family on mortality. While previous studies have focused on low- or middle-income countries, we examine whether growing up in a large family is a disadvantage in Sweden, a context where most parents have adequate resources, which are complemented by a generous welfare state. We used Swedish register data and frailty models, examining all-cause and cause-specific mortality between the ages of 40 and 74 for the 1938–72 cohorts, and also a quasi-experimental approach that exploited multiple births as a source of exogenous variation in the number of siblings. Overall our results do not indicate that growing up in a large family has a detrimental effect on longevity in Sweden

The effects of unemployment among single mothers on adolescent children’s mental health

The effects of parental unemployment on the health and well-being of children have been receiving increased attention in recent years. However, the previous research on this topic focused on children living in two-parent families. This paper studies the effects of maternal unemployment in single- mother families – a particularly vulnerable family setting for coping with the effects of unemployment – on the mental health of adolescent children. We use data from a large, register-based panel of Finnish adolescents aged 15-21 years in 1995-2018 (n=150,073) that includes information on maternal unemployment and adolescent psychotropic medication purchases in six-month periods. We employ panel data models with individual fixed effects to explore how maternal unemployment was associated with adolescents’ psychotropic medication use, net of measured time-varying confounders and all stable unobserved confounders. We estimate separate models for adolescent boys and girls, and also examine whether the effects were mediated through maternal income, or were compensated for by the absent father’s income or the mother’s re-partnering. Our findings show that exposure to maternal unemployment was associated with a moderate increase in psychotropic medication use among boys and girls, although the effect was statistically significant only for boys. This effect was not mediated by the mother’s income, and it did not differ depending on the biological father’s income or the mother’s re-partnering. Our results suggest that boys are more vulnerable to the stressful event of maternal unemployment than girls, and do not support the assumption that the financial consequences and income losses associated with unemployment mediate these effects. Further research is needed to investigate the vulnerability of adolescent boys, and the factors that contribute to the potentially greater resilience of adolescent girls to the effects of maternal unemployment

The impact of unemployment and non-standard forms of employment on the housing autonomy of young adults

Young people are facing challenges in transitioning to housing autonomy because of changes in labour market conditions in recent years. This article explores the effects of youth unemployment and non-standard employment on the likelihood of leaving the parental home. We adopt a dynamic modelling approach, and use data from a large longitudinal British survey covering the years 2009-2014. We find that unemployment and part-time work, but not the duration of the contract, have a negative effect on the likelihood of obtaining housing autonomy. We also find that past as well as anticipated unemployment have significant negative effects, which suggests that the decision about whether to move out depends on the individual’s longer-term labour market trajectory. The analysis also reveals gender differences in part-time work, but not in unemployment once we take into account unobserved time-invariant heterogeneity