FINANCIAL MARKETS' SHUTDOWN AND REACCESS

We employ a discrete‐time parametric duration model on a group of 121 countries over the period 1970–2011 and find that the probability of the end of financial markets' shutdown and reaccess falls as these events become longer. We also show that: (1) shutdown episodes are longer when economic prospects are poor and the degree of financial openness falls, the chief executive has been in office for long periods, and the country has a default history and (2) spells of reaccess tend to be longer when economic growth improves and financial openness increases, there are neither government crises nor government instability, and the country did not default in the past. (JEL C41, G15)     

DO UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFITS AFFECT ON‐THE‐JOB SEARCH? EVIDENCE FROM LABOR TURNOVER BEFORE ESTABLISHMENT CLOSURES

We develop a job search model that predicts that potential job losers would reduce on‐the‐job search (OTJS) effort and job‐to‐job transitions before layoffs, in response to an increase in the potential duration of unemployment benefits (UB). To test this prediction, we exploit changes in the maximum potential duration of benefits in Germany to analyze how it affected labor turnover before establishment closings. The evidence supports the model prediction that workers with longer potential benefit duration are more likely to remain with their establishments until closure and to enter nonemployment. These findings indicate that the effects of UB on the OTJS decisions of potential job losers should be considered in the optimal design of the parameters of unemployment insurance systems. (JEL J63, J64, J65)     

How accommodations affect the duration of post-injury employment spells

I examine the effects of accommodations on the duration of employment spells using a sample of workers reentering the work force after an occupational injury. Unlike previous research, I analyze the post-injury employment history, i.e., more than one employment spell. The results indicate that accommodations have a smaller effect on employment duration than previous studies for workers who have not left their jobs. In addition, only certain types of accommodations, flexible work schedules and modified workplaces, are associated with significant increases in employment duration. The implications of these estimates for disability policy are also briefly discussed.     

The scars of youth: Effects of early‐career unemployment on future unemployment experience

Does early‐career unemployment cause future unemployment? The authors approach this question using German administrative matched employer–employee data that track almost 700,000 individuals over 24 years. Instrumenting early‐career unemployment with firm‐specific labour demand shocks, they find significant and long‐lasting “scarring effects”. In the mean, each additional day of unemployment during the first eight years on the labour market increases unemployment in the following 16 years by half a day. However, quantile regressions show that the scarring effects are much stronger for individuals who already suffer from lengthy and repeated spells of unemployment.     

Nonemployment of Black Men in Major Metropolitan Areas*

The author examines the extent of nonemployment among black males across 64 MSAs in 1980, testing Szymanski's (1976) thesis of functional substitutability of women and black workers in the post-World War II period. Evidence is presented to show that black male nonemployment is partially the result of increased white female employment. The paper concludes with the suggestion that in the United States labor displacement in the post-World War II economy has worked cross-genderly when race is taken into account.     

Environmental sociology and the environmental movement: Towards a theory of pragmatic relationships of critical inquiry

This article explores the question of: what is the relationship between environmental sociology and the environmental movement? In addition to the historical strong links between the two, both have grown tremendously in the last decade. This poses an interesting challenge/problem of practice for environmental sociology. Drawing on the American Pragmatist Movement, I argue that one possible relationship between the subdiscipline and the movement is that of critical inquirers, who constantly rewrite and revise the dominant signs and symbols of the movement, harnessing the vibrant intellectual community and rich research traditions of environmental sociology to enter into a grounded discourse that prevents the movement from becoming stale and/or oppressive, to pull from inventories of stored tools to construct new social spaces to occupy and ways to get there when the old spaces are no longer recognized as adequate, and to forge ahead of the movement, identifying prejudices, barriers, and unforeseen problems of past, current, or future actions.     

NATIONAL CONTEXTS AND DYNAMICS OF MARRIED WOMEN's EMPLOYMENT REENTRY: The Cases of Japan and Taiwan

Previous research has paid little attention to how the national context shapes women's work trajectories. In this study, I examine the rate of married women's labor force reentry in Japan and Taiwan, using event history data constructed from the 1995 Social Stratification and Social Mobility (SSM) Survey for the former and the 1996 Social Change (SC) Survey for the latter. The analysis reveals that Japanese women's timing of reentry reflects changes in their family roles, independent of the duration of work interruption. By contrast, the processes of Taiwanese women's employment return are less closely tied to family stages, but show patterns of duration dependence. These findings indicate that national contexts impact the dynamics of women's labor force reentry after marriage because of their differences in work–family conflict and the time sensitivity of the cost of nonemployment. These contextual differences also influence the effects of other determinants of women's rate of return, including education, husband's income potential, work commitment, and previous job experiences.     

Measuring the effect of spell recurrence on poverty dynamics—evidence from Spain

Accounting for the time individuals spend below the poverty line is an important dimension in order to design social policies to fight against poverty. The literature is currently aiming to construct a consistent aggregate measure of poverty over time that takes into account individual income lifetime profiles. It is however, far from clear which aspects of the specific patterns of poverty spells should be included. Using longitudinal data for Spain, this paper shows that the effect of spell recurrence on poverty dynamics is relevant. Poverty exit and re-entry rates vary not only with personal or household characteristics but also with spell accumulation and the duration of current and past spells. In general, our main findings support that an aggregate intertemporal poverty index should incorporate full individual poverty lifetime trajectories accounting for both poverty and non-poverty spell durations.     

Making parents pay: The unintended consequences of charging parents for foster care

Most families in the child protective services system also interact with the child support enforcement system. This study exploits a natural experiment in Wisconsin, created by the state's large regional variation in child support referral policy, to estimate a potentially important effect of child support enforcement on the duration of out-of-home foster care placement. The effect we examine is whether requiring parents to pay support to offset the costs of foster care delays children's reunification with a parent or other permanent placement. We find evidence of this unintended effect, which is important not only because longer foster care spells are expensive for taxpayers, but also because extended placements in foster care may have consequences for child well-being. Our results highlight the potential importance of cross-systems analysis and the potential consequences when the policies and fundamental objectives of public systems are inconsistently coordinated. We discuss the implications of our findings for child support and child protective services policy.     

Contesting Stigma: On Goffman's Assumptions of Normative Order

Goffman's classic analysis of stigma tacitly suggests that it has a conditional nature. An important shortcoming, however, is that his analysis proceeds from the existence of a normatively shared understanding of the criteria for and the distribution of stigma assignment. I use data from Somali immigrants to Canada to further that argument by showing that stigma as a social object cannot be created when its cultural and structural contexts are disjunctive. Through reverse stigmatization, counter devaluation, and rejection of discrimination, Somalis reveal the problematics of stigma establishment and therein raise the question of who is stigmatizing whom.     

Career Sidestep,Wage Setback? The Impact of Different Types of Employment Interruptions on Wages

We examined the wage implications of different types of wage employment interruptions in a sample of 44,384 Belgian employees. The employment interruption types included are family leave, unemployment, self‐employment, educational leave and a category other interruptions (for example, travel, voluntary work). We conduct separate analyses for men and women. Results indicate that unemployment spells and family breaks are penalized by lower subsequent wages, while the wage impact of self‐employment spells and educational leave is insignificant. Family breaks and unemployment spells were found to be more harmful for men than for women. Implications of the results and directions for future research are discussed.     

Social Stigma and Homelessness: The Limits of Social Change

We examine the issues around the stigmatization of homelessness and how it links to capitalism. Society focuses on the individual as the cause of his or her own state of homelessness, blaming the victim rather than focusing on the larger antecedent social and economic forces, such as unemployment, limited affordable housing, and breakdowns in kinship networks. Social stigma occurs in situations where there is unequal social, economic, and political power and there is an opportunity to label, stereotype, separate (us versus them), lose status, and discriminate. Stigmatization is due, in part, when people feel threatened by another group. Society categorizes people who are homeless as no longer “useful” and/or “functional” members of capitalism, since they do not actively work and support the system. The paper ends on a discussion of the limits of social change in a capitalist society.     

Revisiting the Creating of Settings

I begin by briefly indicating the personal experiences that stimulated me to write the book. I do so because I have come to believe that crucial to the creation of a setting is the range and substance of the leaders' personal and cognitive past experiences in and with complicated settings, and I would also include the length of time of past experience. The shorter the time span of past experience, the more difficult the process will appear, independent of outcome judged by criteria of success or failure. If I had to bet, I would have to say that the shorter that time span, the quicker the criteria for failure will be recognized and the higher the frequency of the death of the setting. I say that not because a longer time span of past experience necessarily indicates that appropriate conclusions have been drawn or that increased age means increased wisdom. What it does mean is that the chances that conclusions appropriate to the creation of a setting have been learned are somewhat higher. Overall, however, the rate of failure is very high. The setting may remain in existence, but its initial purpose may have been long discarded or drastically changed. One could argue that there are instances when these changed purposes should have been discarded. The fact is that we do not know and probably will never know because, as I later indicate, the creation of settings is not likely to be an area of investigation.     

Fat on Campus: Fat College Students and Hyper(in)visible Stigma

This article examines fat college students’ experiences of stigma. Fourteen college students and recent graduates describe their experiences of discrimination and stigma during their college careers. From these interviews, themes of hyper(in)visibility, anticipated stigma, spaces where stigma is more salient, and stigma management emerged. Fat students experience hyper(in)visibility: They are simultaneously hypervisible and invisible, on campus. This experience is impacted by gender and age. This hyper(in)visibility—combined with past experienced stigma—created a sense of anticipated stigma in students. Experiences of hyper(in)visiblity and anticipated stigma are made more salient by the size and shape of various campus spaces: classrooms, dining halls, student recreation centers, and recreational drinking spaces. Fat students often managed this stigma by avoiding these spaces and withdrawing from campus life. Students also embraced other stigma-resistance strategies and found peer groups and campuses spaces to facilitate this resistance.     

Stigma and problem gambling: current knowledge and future research directions

Stigma has been identified as a major barrier to help-seeking, treatment and recovery from gambling problems. However, little research has attempted to examine in any depth the causes, characteristics and consequences of stigma in relation to people experiencing gambling problems. The effects of stigma on people experiencing gambling problems, although not directly examined, are apparent through low rates of problem disclosure and treatment-seeking. In this paper, we aim to inform research into stigma associated with problem gambling by highlighting gaps in existing research and by providing direction for future research. The contribution of this paper is that for the first time stigma and problem gambling are drawn together and reviewed using broad constructs and literature from a range of seminal and new sources to present a synthesis of new and important information on stigma. In regard to problem gambling, the dimensions of stigma, except for origin, have yet to be investigated, as well as the processes of stigma creation, the characteristics of public and felt stigma, and coping strategies used to manage stigma. The practical implications of this review are summarized in a framework provided to inform future research into stigma related to problem gambling.     

Childhood mental health and adult family relationships: How ADHD shapes experiences with intimate unions and parenthood

Increasingly recognized as a chronic condition that can endure across the life course, childhood attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is associated with less stable family formation and more strain around intimate unions (dating, cohabitation and marriage) and parenthood. This article reviews and evaluates multidisciplinary research on childhood ADHD, intimate unions and parenthood, with the purpose of motivating future sociological research in this area. The paper is organized into three general sections. First, I provide an overview of information on ADHD including its diagnosis and treatment, cross-disciplinary etiologies, and sociodemographic correlates. Next, I blend sociological perspectives on labeling and stigma, social stress, and the life course to consider the role of ADHD-related stigma in shaping associations of childhood ADHD with family formation processes (intimate unions and parenthood) and family functioning (relationship quality and communication) in adulthood. Finally, I discuss opportunities for future sociological research on childhood ADHD and adult family relationships that have the potential to contribute both to empirical research on childhood ADHD and adult family relationships, as well as to sociological research at the intersection of family and health.     

LOCUS OF CONTROL AND JOB TURNOVER

In this article, I investigate how a worker's locus of control, that is, the perception of control over daily events, affects job‐to‐job and job‐to‐nonemployment turnover. I find that an increase in internality—the degree to which respondents believe that the outcomes of their life events are determined by their own actions versus external factors—increases job‐to‐job transitions. In addition, the annual wage growth rate and the wage gains from job‐to‐job transitions increase with internality. The influence of the locus of control on job‐to‐nonemployment turnover, however, is insignificant on controlling for the worker's level of attained education. (JEL D83, J63)     

CULTURAL RELATIVISM AND THE STUDY OF DEVIANCE

In this work I argue that the study of deviance as distinct from crime is no longer a productive specialty in sociology. I attribute the cause of the demise of the field to its over reliance on the assumption of cultural relativity. In contrast to the relativist position, I argue that behavior that causes harm will be more likely to be condemned by public opinion and that there will be less variation in attitudes toward behaviors that cause more harm. Using data from the General Social Survey, I find support for the hypothesis that a “deviant” sexual behavior that can have a victim, extramarital sex, will be more consensually condemned than “deviant” sexual behaviors that do not have victims, premarital sex and homosexual sex. I recommend that future research focus on the study of values, as the validity of cultural relativity can be empirically evaluated.     

A Theory of Marital Sexual Life

Why does the frequency of marital sex decrease with marital duration? Does the probability of involvement in extramarital sex increase or decrease with marital duration, and why? I develop a theory to answer these questions. I apply the law of diminishing marginal utility and human capital theory to explain the basic observed decline in the frequency of marital sex with marital duration. Based on the above explanation, I develop a discussion on the relationship between marital duration and extramarital sex, and I derive two hypotheses, which are supported by statistical analyses of the National Health and Social Life Survey data.