The influence of decision-making in tree ring-based climate reconstructions.

Tree-ring chronologies underpin the majority of annually-resolved reconstructions of Common Era climate. However, they are derived using different datasets and techniques, the ramifications of which have hitherto been little explored. Here, we report the results of a double-blind experiment that yielded 15 Northern Hemisphere summer temperature reconstructions from a common network of regional tree-ring width datasets. Taken together as an ensemble, the Common Era reconstruction mean correlates with instrumental temperatures from 1794-2016 CE at 0.79 (p < 0.001), reveals summer cooling in the years following large volcanic eruptions, and exhibits strong warming since the 1980s. Differing in their mean, variance, amplitude, sensitivity, and persistence, the ensemble members demonstrate the influence of subjectivity in the reconstruction process. We therefore recommend the routine use of ensemble reconstruction approaches to provide a more consensual picture of past climate variability

The Ups and Downs in Women's Employment: Shifting Composition or Behavior from 1970 to 2010?

This paper tracks factors contributing to the ups and downs in women’s employment from 1970 to 2010 using regression decompositions focusing on whether changes are due to shifts in the means (composition of women) or due to shifts in coefficients (inclinations of women to work for pay). Compositional shifts in education exerted a positive effect on women’s employment across all decades, while shifts in the composition of other family income, particularly at the highest deciles, depressed married women’s employment over the 1990s contributing to the slowdown in this decade. A positive coefficient effect of education was found in all decades, except the 1990s, when the effect was negative, depressing women’s employment. Further, positive coefficient results for other family income at the highest deciles bolstered married women’s employment over the 1990s. Models are run separately for married and single women demonstrating the varying results of other family income by marital status. This research was supported in part by an Upjohn Institute Early Career Research Award

Cohabiting and Marriage Formation During Young Men's Career Development Process

Using recently released cohabitation data for NLSY79 males, this study conducts multinomial discrete-time event history-analyses of how young men’s career development process affects both the formation and dissolution of cohabiting unions. For a substantial proportion of young men, cohabitation seems to represent an adaptive strategy during a period of career immaturity, as measured by employment instability, while marriage was a far more likely outcome for both stably employed cohabitors and noncohabitors alike. Earnings positively affected the entry into either a cohabiting or marital union and exhibited a strong threshold effect. However, consistent with a selectivity argument, once cohabiting, earnings had little effect on the odds of marrying out of a cohabitation although higher earnings did discourage separations among whites. Men with better long-run socioeconomic prospects, i.e., the college educated, were far more likely to marry from either the noncohabiting or cohabiting state and this was particularly true for blacks

Work and the family: a study in social demography

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