Opting Out and Buying Out: Wives' Earnings and Housework Time

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/106834/1/j.1741-3737.2010.00818.x.pd

Mothers\u27 Long-Term Employment Patterns

Previous research on maternal employment has disproportionately focused on married, college-educated mothers and examined either current employment status or postpartum return to employment. Following the life course perspective, we instead conceptualize maternal careers as long-term life course patterns. Using data from the NLSY79 and optimal matching, we document four common employment patterns of American mothers over the first 18 years of maternity. About two-thirds follow steady patterns, either full-time employment (38 percent) or steady nonemployment (24 percent). The rest experience “mixed” patterns: long-term part-time employment (20 percent), or a multiyear period of nonemployment following maternity, then a return to employment (18 percent). Consistent employment following maternity, either full-time or part-time, is characteristic of women with more economic advantages. Women who experience consistent nonemployment disproportionately lack a high school degree, while women with return to employment following a long break tend to be younger with lower wages prior to maternity. Race is one of the few predictors of whether a mother is consistently employed full time versus part time: consistent part-time labor is distinctive to white women. Our results support studying maternal employment across the economic spectrum, considering motherhood as a long-term characteristic, and employing research approaches that reveal the qualitative distinctness of particular employment patterns

Charter-School Management Organizations: Diverse Strategies and Diverse Student Impacts

Examines the growth of charter school management organizations, characteristics of students served, and use of resources; CMO practices; impact on students, including middle school test scores; and structures and practices linked to positive outcomes

Discutindo a educação ambiental no cotidiano escolar: desenvolvimento de projetos na escola formação inicial e continuada de professores

A presente pesquisa buscou discutir como a Educação Ambiental (EA) vem sendo trabalhada, no Ensino Fundamental e como os docentes desta escola compreendem e vem inserindo a EA no cotidiano escolar., em uma escola estadual do município de Tangará da Serra/MT, Brasil. Para tanto, realizou-se entrevistas com os professores que fazem parte de um projeto interdisciplinar de EA na escola pesquisada. Verificou-se que o projeto da escola não vem conseguindo alcançar os objetivos propostos por: desconhecimento do mesmo, pelos professores; formação deficiente dos professores, não entendimento da EA como processo de ensino-aprendizagem, falta de recursos didáticos, planejamento inadequado das atividades. A partir dessa constatação, procurou-se debater a impossibilidade de tratar do tema fora do trabalho interdisciplinar, bem como, e principalmente, a importância de um estudo mais aprofundado de EA, vinculando teoria e prática, tanto na formação docente, como em projetos escolares, a fim de fugir do tradicional vínculo “EA e ecologia, lixo e horta”.Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educació

Moms at Work: The Dynamics of Maternal Employment

Maternal employment rates have risen substantially over recent decades, but 3 in 10 mothers of minor children are not employed, and 5 in 10 do not work full time, with the majority of nonemployed mothers reporting that they would prefer employment. At the same time, women’s employment decisions have become less correlated with their own wages and those of their husbands, suggesting that policies attempting to use financial incentives to increase maternal employment may be inadequate. We will use sequence analysis and data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) to describe maternal employment patterns over 18 years of maternity. This approach acknowledges that negotiation of the work-family intersection is an ongoing challenge. Using multinomial logit models, we will then examine how maternal employment patterns vary with the traits of women and their occupations, including occupations’ percent female, returns to experience, and typical work hours. Our results will thus suggest labor market regulations and policies that might promote maternal employment by altering the non-financial traits of work, as well as describe the different supports for combining work and family that may be necessary for mothers at different positions in the economic distribution

What Money Buys and Family Costs: Three Papers on the Work-Family Intersection.

Family responsibilities and market work have the potential to influence one another. First, financial rewards received from the labor market may provide individuals with resources that they can use to manage their family responsibilities. In the first two empirical chapters, I examine the relationship between wives’ earnings and their time in housework, testing whether, to what extent, and how wives’ earnings allow them to reduce their household labor burden. In Chapter 2, “Money Isn’t Everything: Wives’ Earnings and Housework Time”, I use fixed-effects models and data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and find that wives reduce housework time as their earnings rise. However, the effect is highly non-linear, with high-earning wives achieving little additional reduction in housework. Thus, high-income wives continue to spend considerable time in housework, despite their substantial financial resources. Chapter 3, “Opting Out and Buying Out: Wives’ Earnings and Housework Time”, uses data from the Consumption and Activities Mail Survey of the Health and Retirement Study to test whether expenditures on market substitutes for household labor explain the negative relationship between wives’ earnings and their housework time. Expenditures on market substitutes explain less than 15% of the relationship between wives’ earnings and their housework time. This suggests that wives’ earnings may instead allow them to “opt out” of some housework, foregoing this labor without purchasing a substitute. Additionally, family responsibilities may affect individuals’ work lives. For men, becoming fathers may lead to increased investment in wage-earning, as men are motivated to provide financially for their children. Chapter 4, “A Reconsideration of the Fatherhood Premium”, hypothesizes that lower commitment to the fatherhood role and greater role ambiguity will lead to a smaller wage premium for nonresidential fathers and stepfathers as compared to residential fathers. Using panel models and data from the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, I find that married, residential fatherhood is associated with wage gains, while nonresidential fatherhood and stepfatherhood are associated with wage losses compared to the wages of childless men of the same union status, and unmarried, residential fatherhood leads to no wage changes for men.Ph.D.Public Policy & SociologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/84600/1/akillewa_1.pd

Does Your Home Make You Wealthy?

Estimating the lifetime wealth consequences of homeownership is complicated by ongoing events, such as divorce or inheritance, that may shape both homeownership decisions and later-life wealth. We argue that prior research that has not accounted for these dynamic selection processes has overstated the causal effect of homeownership on wealth. Using NLSY79 data and marginal structural models, we find that each additional year of homeownership increases midlife wealth in 2008 by about $6,800, more than 25 percent less than estimates from models that do not account for dynamic selection. Hispanic and African American wealth benefits from each homeownership year are 62 percent and 48 percent as large as those of whites, respectively. Homeownership remains wealth-enhancing in 2012, but shows smaller returns. Our results confirm homeownership’s role in wealth accumulation and that variation in both homeownership rates and the wealth benefits of homeownership contribute to racial and ethnic disparities in midlife wealth holdings

Replication code for: Killewald, Alexandra, and Ian Lundberg. 2017 "New evidence against a causal marriage wage premium."

Recent research has shown that men’s wages rise more rapidly than expected prior to marriage, but interpretations diverge on whether this indicates selection or a causal effect of anticipating marriage. We seek to adjudicate this debate by bringing together literatures on (1) the male marriage wage premium; (2) selection into marriage based on men’s economic circumstances; and (3) the transition to adulthood, during which both union formation and unusually rapid improvements in work outcomes often occur. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, we evaluate these perspectives. We show that wage declines predate rather than follow divorce, indicating no evidence that staying married benefits men’s wages. We find that older grooms experience no unusual wage patterns at marriage, suggesting that the observed marriage premium may simply reflect co-occurrence with the transition to adulthood for younger grooms. We show that men entering shotgun marriages experience similar premarital wage gains as other grooms, casting doubt on the claim that anticipation of marriage drives wage increases. We conclude that the observed wage patterns are most consistent with men marrying when their wages are already rising more rapidly than expected and divorcing when their wages are already falling, with no additional causal effect of marriage on wages