Wanting more but working less: involuntary part-time employment and economic vulnerability

Using data from the Current Population Survey, a national survey of U.S. households, this brief outlines a strong association between involuntary part-time employment and economic vulnerability. Author Rebecca Glauber reports that the involuntary part-time employment rate more than doubled between 2007 and 2012. For women, it rose from 3.6 percent to 7.8 percent and, for men, the rate increased from 2.4 percent in 2007 to 5.9 percent in 2012. Involuntary part-time employment is a key factor in poverty. In 2012, one in four involuntary part-time workers lived in poverty, whereas just one in twenty full-time workers lived in poverty. In 2012, involuntary part-time workers were nearly five times more likely than full-time workers to have spent more than three months of the previous year unemployed. Not only do part-time workers bring home less money than full-time workers, but they also tend to have fewer fringe benefits. Involuntary part-time workers face even greater penalties. As this brief describes, they are more likely to live in poverty and to experience sustained periods of unemployment

Family-friendly policies for rural working mothers

For working parents, family friendly work policies like paid sick days, flexible time, or medical insurance can reduce work-family conflict and lead to less absenteeism and higher productivity. Working parents in rural America, however, have less access to these policies than their urban counterparts

Involuntary Part-Time Employment: A Slow and Uneven Economic Recovery

In this brief, author Rebecca Glauber reports that, although unemployment overall has returned to its pre-recession level, involuntary part-time employment is still much higher than it was before the Great Recession began--a trend that raises questions about the continuing ability of the economy to deliver employment security to people willing and able to work. Involuntary part-time employment is down 34 percent since the Great Recession but is still above its pre-recession level. If the involuntary part-time employment rate continues this pace of decline, it will not return to its pre-recession level until 2018, a full nine years after the official end of the recession. Racial disparities persist. Since the recession, involuntary part-time employment declined by over 30 percent for white, Asian, and Hispanic workers but by less than 20 percent for black workers. Among workers with less than a high school degree, 9 percent work part time involuntarily, compared to just 2 percent of college graduates. Involuntary part-time workers are more than five times as likely as full-time workers to live in poverty. As the economy continues to recover, Glauber recommends that the complexities of involuntary part-time employment and disparities in the recovery are explored

The Unmet Need for Care: Vulnerability Among Older Adults

In this brief, authors Rebecca Glauber and Melissa Day explore factors that exacerbate the unmet need for care among the noninstitutionalized older population and seek to deter­mine who is likely to need care but go without. They find that unmarried individuals and those who live alone are more likely than others to need care but not receive it. These older adults are frail, have difficulty meet­ing their daily needs, and do not have family members or friends to whom to turn in times of need. This group of vulnerable older adults requires an array of social supports

Harnessing and Sharing the Benefits of State Sponsored Research

In recent years data-sharing has been a recurring focus of struggle within the scientific research community as improvements in information technology and digital networks have expanded the ways that data can be produced, disseminated, and used. Information technology makes it easier to share data in publicly accessible archives that aggregate data from multiple sources. Such sharing and aggregation facilitate observations that would otherwise be impossible. But data disclosure poses a dilemma for scientists. Data have long been the stock in trade of working scientists, lending credibility to their claims while highlighting new questions that are worthy of future research funding. Some disclosure is necessary in order to claim these benefits, but data disclosure may also benefit one\u27s research competitors. Scientists who share their data promptly and freely may find themselves at a competitive disadvantage relative to free riders in the race to make future observations and thereby to earn further recognition and funding. The possibility of commercial gain further raises the competitive stakes. This article discusses data sharing in California\u27s stem cell initiative against the background of other data sharing efforts and in light of the competing interests that the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) is directed to balance. We begin by considering how IP law affects data-sharing. We then assess the strategic considerations that guide the IP and data policies and strategies of federal, state, and private research sponsors. With this background, we discuss four specific sets of issues that public sponsors of data-rich research, including CIRM, are likely to confront: (1) how to motivate researchers to contribute data; (2) who may have access to the data and on what conditions; (3) what data get deposited and when do they get deposited; and (4) how to establish database architecture and curate and maintain the database

Research and Practice in Transition: Improving Support and Advocacy of Transgender Middle School Students

In this essay, our purposes are to inspire particular avenues of future research addressing Transgender students, in middle school in particular, and to inform the professional development of teachers in support of these Transgender youth. In relation to the ways in which research can more authentically represent Transgender identity, we argue for the use of Transgender theory as a guiding framework for research addressing Transgender students, issues, and needs. We also describe the particular affordances of qualitative, ethnographic, and phenomenological studies in capturing the unique and highly personal experiences and realities of Transgender individuals, and specifically, in middle school. We then discuss how schools are structured socially and politically along heteronormative and cisnormative lines, presenting a stumbling block for Transgender rights advocacy in educational contexts. Finally, we review the potential of teachers to be the necessary educational change agents to spur greater understanding of and advocacy for students’ gender inclusivity

Employment, Poverty, and Public Assistance in the Rural United States

In this brief, authors Rebecca Glauber and Andrew Schaefer provide a glimpse of the economic and demographic characteristics of life in the rural United States. Using data from the American Community Survey, they compare those living in low- and lower-middle-income counties to those living in upper-middle- and high-income counties. Additionally, they compare counties at the extremes, where median incomes are in the bottom and top 10 percent of the income distribution. They report that nearly 75 percent of low-income rural counties in the United States are in the South. Compared to lower-income rural counties, higher-income rural counties have a larger share of immigrants but a smaller share of non-native speakers. One-fifth of immigrants in low-income rural counties do not speak English, compared to just one-twentieth of immigrants in high-income rural counties. People living in poorer rural counties rely more heavily than those living in more well-off rural counties on public-sector supports, and they are less likely to work. Although policy makers tend to focus on people living in the urban United States, the authors’ results show that those living in the rural United States, and particularly in low-income counties, may have even more to gain from public health insurance and other social safety-net programs

A Structural Approach to Identifying the Sources of Local-Currency Price Stability

The inertia of the local-currency prices of traded goods in the face of exchange-rate changes is a well-documented phenomenon in International Economics. This paper develops a structural model to identify the sources of this local-currency price stability and applies it to micro data from the beer market. The empirical procedure exploits manufacturers’ and retailers’ first-order conditions in conjunction with detailed information on the frequency of price adjustments following exchange-rate changes to quantify the relative importance of local non-traded cost components, markup adjustment by manufacturers and retailers, and nominal price rigidities in the incomplete transmission of such changes to prices. We find that, on average, approximately 60% of the incomplete exchange rate pass-through is due to local non-traded costs; 8% to markup adjustment; 30% to the existence of own-brand price adjustment costs, and 1% to the indirect/strategic effect of such costs, though these results vary considerably across individual brands according to their market shares.