The domestic and gendered context for retirement

Against a global backdrop of population and workforce ageing, successive UK governments have encouraged people to work longer and delay retirement. Debates focus mainly on factors affecting individuals’ decisions on when and how to retire. We argue that a fuller understanding of retirement can be achieved by recognizing the ways in which individuals’ expectations and behaviours reflect a complicated, dynamic set of interactions between domestic environments and gender roles, often established over a long time period, and more temporally proximate factors. Using a qualitative data set, we explore how the timing, nature and meaning of retirement and retirement planning are played out in specific domestic contexts. We conclude that future research and policies surrounding retirement need to: focus on the household, not the individual; consider retirement as an often messy and disrupted process and not a discrete event; and understand that retirement may mean very different things for women and for men

Parametric hazard rate models for long-term sickness absence

PURPOSE: In research on the time to onset of sickness absence and the duration of sickness absence episodes, Cox proportional hazard models are in common use. However, parametric models are to be preferred when time in itself is considered as independent variable. This study compares parametric hazard rate models for the onset of long-term sickness absence and return to work. METHOD: Prospective cohort study on sickness absence with four follow-up years of 53,830 employees working in the private sector in the Netherlands. The time to onset of long-term (>6 weeks) sickness absence and return to work were modelled by parametric hazard rate models. RESULTS: The exponential parametric model with a constant hazard rate most accurately described the time to onset of long-term sickness absence. Gompertz-Makeham models with monotonically declining hazard rates best described return to work. CONCLUSIONS: Parametric models offer more possibilities than commonly used models for time-dependent processes as sickness absence and return to work. However, the advantages of parametric models above Cox models apply mainly for return to work and less for onset of long-term sickness absence

Organizational Mortality of Small Firms: The Effects of Entrepreneurial Age and Human Capital

This paper addresses the issue of internal determination of organizational outcomes. It is argued that in small and simply structured organizations a considerable proportion of the variance in organizational activities and outcomes is associated with individuals. In particular, the paper uses human capital theory to derive hypotheses about individual determinants of organizational mortality. These hypotheses are tested with event-history data of firm registrations and de-registrations in a West German region. The hypotheses are corroborated by the data, but the effects may nonetheless be due to processes linking individual characteristics with organizational performance other than those suggested by the human capital approach

Who Benefits Most from a University Degree?: A Cross-National Comparison of Selection and Wage Returns in the US, UK, and Germany

Recent research on economic returns to higher education in the United States suggests that those with the highest wage returns to a college degree are least likely to obtain one. We extend the study of heterogeneous returns to tertiary education across multiple institutional contexts, investigating how the relationship between wage returns and the propensity to complete a degree varies by the level of expansion, differentiation, and cost of higher education. Drawing on panel data and matching techniques, we compare findings from the US with selection into degree completion in Germany and the UK. Contrary to previous studies, we find little evidence for population level heterogeneity in economic returns to higher education

Determinants of occupational mobility: the importance of place of work

The LSCS is supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)/JISC, the Scottish Funding Council, the Chief Scientist’s Office, and the Scottish government.This research focuses on individual and place-based determinants of occupational mobility in Scotland over the period 2001–11. Its originality relates to the importance of workplace location, rather than residential locations, on occupational mobility, and in questioning the idea that spatial mobility accelerates occupational mobility. The findings also indicate that skill level and employment in ‘knowledge-intensive’ sectors are key determinants of career progression. Urban career escalator effects are found to be particularly evident for higher-skilled workers. The findings point to the importance of spatial sophistication and sectoral sensitivity in understandings of occupational mobility.PostprintPeer reviewe

International Coercion, Emulation and Policy Diffusion: Market-Oriented Infrastructure Reforms, 1977-1999

Why do some countries adopt market-oriented reforms such as deregulation, privatization and liberalization of competition in their infrastructure industries while others do not? Why did the pace of adoption accelerate in the 1990s? Building on neo-institutional theory in sociology, we argue that the domestic adoption of market-oriented reforms is strongly influenced by international pressures of coercion and emulation. We find robust support for these arguments with an event-history analysis of the determinants of reform in the telecommunications and electricity sectors of as many as 205 countries and territories between 1977 and 1999. Our results also suggest that the coercive effect of multilateral lending from the IMF, the World Bank or Regional Development Banks is increasing over time, a finding that is consistent with anecdotal evidence that multilateral organizations have broadened the scope of the “conditionality” terms specifying market-oriented reforms imposed on borrowing countries. We discuss the possibility that, by pressuring countries into policy reform, cross-national coercion and emulation may not produce ideal outcomes.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/40099/3/wp713.pd

Lives on track? Long-term earnings returns to selective school placement in England and Denmark

We explore the influence of between-school ability placement at lower secondary education on earnings across the life course in England and Denmark. We go beyond the mid-career snapshot provided by previous studies by exploiting the availability of four decades worth of earnings data for individuals born in the mid-1950s. Members of this cohort who were judged to be among the most academically able attended grammar schools in England (19 percent) and advanced secondary schools (Realskole) in Denmark (51 percent) prior to the start of comprehensivisation. This key difference makes England and Denmark interesting cases for comparison, not least since pro-selection policies have re-emerged in England based on the claim that grammar schools lead to better educational and labour market outcomes. Our analysis of the influence of selective school placement on earnings finds little support for this contention. We find that those from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds were strikingly under-represented in schools ear-marked for higher ability pupils in both countries, even after taking into account social class differences in measured ability. Our analysis for England finds only modest earnings returns to attending a grammar school, totalling just £39,000 across the life course, while in Denmark the lifetime earnings returns to attending Realskole are somewhat larger (£194,000). Because those from advantaged backgrounds were substantially over-represented at grammar schools and Realskoles, these returns accrue disproportionately to pupils from more advantaged backgrounds. Lower secondary school placement in Denmark accounts for forty percent of the intergenerational reproduction of socioeconomic advantage and disadvantage, more than half of which is due to selection into school types based on socioeconomic background rather than measured ability. Our findings question the wisdom of expanding grammar schools when they appear to do little to improve individuals’ earnings or increase social mobility

Finland

Peer reviewe