COHABITATION: AN ELUSIVE CONCEPT

Rates of out-of-wedlock births in the US have increased over the past three decades and rates of cohabitation among unwed parents have risen. Consequently, unwed parenthood is decreasingly synonymous with single parenthood. As we focus more attention on unwed parents, their living arrangements, and relationships, it is becoming clear that cohabitation is an ambiguous concept that is difficult to measure. In this study, we use the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing data to document how sensitive cohabitation estimates can be to various sources of information and we demonstrate that relationships among unwed parents fall along a continuum, from marriage-like cohabitation at one extreme to parents who have no contact at all with one another at the other. The results underscore the limitations of using binary measures of cohabitation to characterize parent relationships.

Effect of Insurance on Infant Health: A Case Study of Low-Income Women in New Jersey

There have been relatively few evaluations of the effect of private insurance and Medicaid on infant health, and results from previous studies are inconclusive. The objective of this study if to estimate the effect of private insurance coverage and Medicaid participation on birth weight and the incidence of low-birth weight controlling for non-random selection of insurance status. Our data consist of vital records that have been linked to hospital discharge records and Medicaid claims for all births to women in New Jersey in the years 1989 and 1990. We use ordinary least squares regression and instrumental variables procedures to obtain estimates of the effect of insurance status on birth weight. We limit our analysis to low-income women as this is the population most at risk of an adverse birth outcome and the target of Medicaid. The results indicate that Medicaid has a small effect on the incidence of low-birth weight for black women, but has little effect on average birth weight for low-income women. Our preferred estimates suggest that Medicaid participation reduces the incidence of low-birth weight for black women by between 5 and 10 percent. A similar finding was found with regard to private insurance. Private insurance had little effect on average birth weight for both black and white women, and reduced the incidence of low-birth weight for black and white women by between 15 and 25 percent.Insurance, Medicaid, Infants

Mental Illness as a Barrier to Marriage Among Mothers With Out-of-Wedlock Births

This study explores how mental illness shapes transitions to marriage among unwed mothers using augmented data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study. We estimate proportional hazard models to assess the effects of mental illness on the likelihood of marriage over a five year period following a non-marital birth. Diagnosed mental illness was obtained from the survey respondents' prenatal medical records. We find that mothers with mental illness were about two thirds as likely as mothers without mental illness to marry, even after controlling for demographic characteristics, and that human capital, relationship quality, partner selection, and substance abuse explain only a small proportion of the effect of mental illness on marriage.

Effects of Child Health on Parents' Relationship Status

We use data from the national longitudinal Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to estimate the effect of poor child health on father presence. We look at whether parents live in the same household 12-18 months after the child's birth and also at how their relationships changed along a continuum (married, cohabiting, romantically involved, friends, or not involved) during the same period. We find that having an infant in poor health reduces the likelihood that parents will live together and increases the likelihood that they will become less committed to their relationship, particularly among parents with low socioeconomic status.

Mothers' and Fathers' Labor Supply in Fragile Families: The Role of Child Health

We estimate the effect of poor child health on the labor supply of mothers and fathers post welfare reform, using a national sample of mostly unwed parents and their children-a group at high risk of living in poverty. We account for the potential endogeneity of child health and find that having a young child in poor health reduces the mother's probability of working, the mother's hours of work, and the father's hours of work. These results suggest that children's health problems may diminish their parents' capacity to invest in their health.

Mother's Labor Supply in Fragile Families: The Role of Child Health

A growing body of research indicates that low socioeconomic status in early childhood sets the stage for increasing disadvantages in both health and educational capital over the child's life course and can cause low socioeconomic status to persist for generations. The study estimated the effects of poor child health on the labor supply of mothers with one-year-old children using a national longitudinal data set that oversampled unmarried parents in the post welfare reform era. It was found that having a child in poor health reduces the mother's probability of working by eight percentage points and her hours of work by three per week when she is employed. Another important finding is that the father having children with another partner increases the mothers' labor supply, even after controlling for the focal child's health status and numerous other covariates.

Effects of Child Health on Sources of Public Support

We estimate the effects of having a child in poor health on the mother's receipt of both cash assistance and in-kind public support in the form of food, health care, and shelter. We control for a rich set of covariates, include state fixed effects, and test for the potential endogeneity of child health. Mothers with children in poor health are 5 percentage points (20%) more likely to rely on TANF and 16 percentage points more likely to rely on cash assistance (TANF and/or SSI) than those with healthy children. They are also more likely than those with healthy children to receive Medicaid and housing assistance, but not WIC or food stamps.

Hours Equity is the New Pay Equity

At the dawning of the fifty-year anniversary of the Equal Pay Act of 1963, and as the same anniversary of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 draws near, it is time to change the way we think about pay equity. Workplace fairness between women and men should no longer be framed merely by total disparities in pay, but also by disparities in hours given to women seeking as much work as their male counterparts. Doing so recognizes the realities of many female workers in today’s workplace and addresses the shortfalls thus far absent from the civil rights conversation about pay equity. Today’s workforce is filled with female contingent workers who are at the mercy of their supervisors as to the number of hours they work. The number of part-time workers has steadily increased over the last decade, with involuntary part-time workers (those forced to downgrade from full-time to part-time because of economic conditions or the employer’s needs) numbering 8.2 million and the total number of part-time workers exceeding 27 million. Two-thirds of part-time workers are women, and as the Congressional Joint Economic Committee has recognized, the gender pay gap is partly driven by the earning penalty for part-time work, which pays less per hour than the same or equivalent work done by full-timers. One under-examined factor in this pay inequity is the power of scheduling that employer supervisors have over their part-time work force. From the outside, supervisors seemingly make capricious decisions on whom to schedule, when, and for how many hours. When individual supervisors make these unilateral decisions without regard to employment standards or criteria, they appear to do so with little oversight and guidance, which can lead to discriminatory bias based on gender. This gender bias can be motivated (consciously or unconsciously) by societal stereotypes casting women as less than “ideal workers” with weak commitment to the workplace because of outside caregiving responsibilities. From a doctrinal standpoint, however, the current statutory regimes seem ill suited to address these disparities. The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938 merely mandates minimum and overtime wages, the Equal Pay Act of 1963 does not cover hours equity, and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964’s anti-discrimination mandate rarely (if ever) reaches the issue of scheduling and is therefore sorely underdeveloped. Moreover, due to recent Supreme Court decisions dramatically restricting employment discrimination class actions, bringing aggregate litigation for low-wage workers will be an uphill battle, one attorneys are likely loathe to take on for relatively low damages. This Article makes the case for changing the way we think about pay equity. Because our workforce is filled with part-time workers, advocates for low-wage workers should focus not only on pay inequities and living wages, but also on hours equity. Hours equity would provide much-needed stability to scheduling that would allow female part-time workers to have a reliable schedule with guaranteed hours so that they make an expected amount of pay

Parenthood Status and Compensation in Law Practice

This article asks how cultural frameworks of status influence the evaluation of performance including compensation and advancement of lawyers who were seven years into their practice. We borrow from the work on status expectations that goes beyond gender distinctions and assesses whether the concept of motherhood has a negative impact on assessment of female lawyers. Status expectations theory hypothesizes that mothers are valued less because they are less committed to the workplace and thus receive a motherhood penalty while men receive a fatherhood bonus in compensation decisions. Employing data from the After The JD study, we test the impact of parenthood on compensation decisions. Our analysis reveals that gender matters more than parenthood status in compensation. Thus we conclude that parenthood is not found to have a significant effect on credentials, orientation to work, or practice setting. Women in Legal Practice: Global and Local Perspectives, Symposium, June 5-8, 2012. Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association