Transitions from Temporary to Permanent Work in Canada: Who Makes the Transition and Why?

The focus of this paper is on a microeconomic analysis of the annual transition rate from temporary to permanent work of individual workers in Canada for the period 1999–2004. Given that a large proportion of temporary employment is involuntary, an understanding of the factors associated with the transition to permanent work may inform public policy. Factors associated with the transition, namely, human capital, household structures and labour market segmentation are analyzed using data from the Statistics Canada’s Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID) for the period 1999–2004, limited to paid workers aged 20–64 years, excluding students. Among the key factors associated with the transitions are younger age and low unemployment rates. The analysis adds to the Canadian and international literature on transitions from temporary to permanent work.

Child support and non-resident fathers’ contact with their children

The paper presents a model of a non-resident father’s child support and contact with his child, which combines the public good treatment of “child quality” with “trade” in father–child contact time in a setting of non-cooperative interaction. It predicts that father’s income and mother’s non-labour income should have exactly the same effect on the frequency of father–child contact if he chooses to make lump sum payments to the mother. If he does not or there is a binding child support payment order, they have effects opposite in direction. A higher binding support order reduces father–child contact but may well raise “child quality”.

Dropping out of post-compulsory education in the UK: an analysis of determinants and outcomes

We analyse the decision to drop out of post-compulsory education over the period 1985–1994 using data from the Youth Cohort Surveys. We show that the dropout rate declined between 1985 and 1994, in spite of the rising participation rate in education, but is still substantial. Dropping out is more or less constant over the period of study, though the risk of dropout does vary with young people’s prior attainment, ethnicity, family background and the state of the labour market. The course of study has a substantial effect on the risk of dropout.

The impact of the labour market on the timing of marriage and births in Spain

This paper investigates how education and the labour market affect Spanish individual decisions on the timing of marriage and births, using a Cox hazard approach. It disentangles men and women, and two groups, Cohort 1945–1960 and Cohort 1961–1977. Results show that female employment delays marriage in Cohort 1945–1960, but it has a reverse effect in Cohort 1961–1977. We also find evidence that employment is a barrier for family formation since employed women postpone births in both cohorts. The precarious Spanish labour markets, captured by female unemployment rates, delay family formation, especially by putting off marriage. Male unemployment, at the individual level, impacts negatively on fertility only through delaying marriage.

Fathers–participation in the domestic activities of everyday life

In this paper, the data from the multi-purpose survey on household “Time Use” conducted by Istat (the Italian National Statistical Institute) in 2002–2003 and the data from this same survey conducted in 1988–1989 will be analysed with the purpose of describing the fathers’ daily participation in the domestic activities and of highlighting the changes that have taken place during the 14 years elapsed between the two survey editions. The analysis will be carried out using standard time-use data analysis’ tool, time budget tables and by applying a multi-variate regression model with the objective of separating the relative contribution of the behavioural and structural factors to explain the variation observed.

Birth order matters: the effect of family size and birth order on educational attainment

Using the British Household Panel Survey, we investigate if family size and birth order affect children’s subsequent educational attainment. Theory suggests a trade-off between child quantity and “quality” and that siblings are unlikely to receive equal shares of parental resources devoted to children’s education. We construct a new birth order index that effectively purges family size from birth order and use this to test if siblings are assigned equal shares in the family’s educational resources. We find that the shares are decreasing with birth order. Ceteris paribus, children from larger families have less education, and the family size effect does not vanish when we control for birth order. These findings are robust to numerous specification checks.

Child mortality, fertility, and human capital accumulation

This article analyzes the impact of decline in child mortality on fertility and economic growth. The study shows that the timing of mortality relative to education is crucial to implications of mortality decline. If child mortality is realized before education starts, an exogenous decline in child mortality leads to a decline in education—a finding that is opposite to those of studies that considered a decline in mortality after the cost of education has been incurred. The work also demonstrates the role of parental human capital in reducing child mortality and the causal link between rising education and declining child mortality.

Temporary Employment and Social Inequality in Canada: Exploring Intersections of Gender, Race and Immigration Status

Using data from the 2002–2004 waves of Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics, this article investigates the consequences of different types of temporary employment—fixed-term or contract, casual, agency and seasonal employment—for differently situated workers in Canada. Attention to intersecting social locations of gender, race and immigrant status helps capture the complex implications of temporary work for inequality. In particular, it highlights the salience of gender relations in shaping workers’ experience of insecurity in different types of temporary employment.

Understanding the effects of siblings on child mortality: evidence from India

Given the intrinsically sequential nature of childbirth, timing of a child’s birth has consequences not only for itself but also for its older and younger siblings. The paper argues that prior spacing and posterior spacing between consecutive siblings are thus important measures of intensity of sibling competition for limited parental resources. While the available estimates of child mortality tend to ignore the endogeneity of sibling composition, we use a correlated recursive model of prior and posterior spacing and child mortality to correct it. There is evidence that uncorrected estimates under-estimate the effects of prior and posterior spacing on child mortality.

From Casual Work to Economic Security: The Case of British Columbia

Analysis of casual work in British Columbia is an important issue given that the increase in casual work has been greater in this province than in other provinces in Canada and given that the labour market has been substantially deregulated since 2001. In this paper, we analyse how individuals’ casual employment status affects their economic security based on a specially designed survey undertaken by the authors. We follow the ILO’s classification of the dimensions of economic security but, based on our findings, add a further dimension—Time security—As being of particular importance to casual workers. On the basis of these results, we analyse the policy interventions that might be necessary to increase the economic security of casual workers, policies which we suggest can best be conceptualized as providing a “security quilt”.

Heterogeneity in the intergenerational transmission of educational attainment: evidence from Switzerland on natives and second-generation immigrants

This study applies rich data from the 2000 Swiss census to investigate the patterns of intergenerational education transmission for natives and second-generation immigrants. The level of secondary schooling attained by youth aged 17 is related to their parents’ educational outcomes based on data on the entire Swiss population. Extending economic theories of child educational attainment, we derive hypotheses regarding the patterns of intergenerational education transmission. The data yield substantial heterogeneity in intergenerational transmission across population groups. Only a small share of this heterogeneity is explained by the predictions of economic theory.

Immigrant assimilation pre and post labour market entry: evidence from the UK Labour Force Survey

We estimate models of employment an earnings for a sample of white and non-white male immigrants drawn from the Labour Force Survey between 1993 and 2004. Immigrants who arrived to enter the labour market (labour market entrants) are distinguished from those who arrived to complete their education (education entrants). Diverse patterns of labour market assimilation are found depending on ethnicity and immigrant type. Amongst labour market entrants, whites do better than non-whites, whilst amongst education entrants, highly qualified prime-age non-whites perform as well as their white counterparts. Relative to white natives, labour market outcomes for all immigrant groups have a tendency to decline with age.

What Characterises Women Vulnerable to Chronic Energy Deficiency?

Weight-for-squared height or body mass index (BMI) is often considered as an effective predictor of morbidity and mortality rates. This study uses BMI data from a sample of ever-married women in the age group of 15–49 years in the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh for the year 1998–1999, to analyse the determinants of chronic energy deficiency (CED) and estimate the population vulnerable to CED. The results highlight that CED rates and vulnerability rates can be very different, emphasizing need for policy intervention to focus on ‘potential’ CED persons. The characteristics of vulnerable population identified would be appropriate channels for policy intervention.

The Differentiation of Social Demands in Europe. The Social Basis of the European Models of Capitalism

This paper tests the impact of various determinants of the preference for two key elements of the European social models: redistribution and trade unions, using individual data from the first round of the European Social Survey. The basic hypothesis is that the main determinant of an individual’s support for these elements of the European models is the social position of the individual in terms of income, status and risks attached to their labour market insertion. The paper also considers the relative importance of less ‘materialist’ influences such as religion or other cultural determinants. The estimations show that ‘materialist’ determinants are by far the most important influences on individual preferences, contrary to what most social theories of modernisation contend.

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Individual and institutional determinants of multidimensional poverty: A European comparison

In this article we evaluate to what extent between-country differences in the probability of being ‘multidimensional’ poor can be explained by a range of ‘domain-specific’ indicators of welfare regime arrangements. To this end, a so-called micro-macro model is estimated, testing the ‘independent’ effect of institutions, as opposed to alternative explanations such as between-country differences in population composition and economic affluence. Although we conclude that institutional arrangements do influence the risk of multidimensional poverty in the expected direction, we also find that bringing the ‘economy’ back into the analyses has a non-trivial impact. Our results point at several avenues for further discussion and research. First, although the more elaborate welfare regimes generally do a better job in preventing poverty, the level of transfers is not always ‘proportional’ to the general standard of living in these countries. Second, we only find partial confirmation for the often cited ‘negative’ impact of labour market flexibility and the related equality-jobs trade-off. While stricter employment regulations do reduce the poverty risk (be it only after controlling for economic affluence), flexibility in terms of the availability of fixed-term labour seems to be preferable to unemployment, even if at the individual level, labour market flexibility increases the likelihood of being poor quite severely.

Strategic altruistic transfers and rent seeking within the family

This paper examines the rent-seeking behavior of “selfish” children in competing for parental transfers. The paper extends Chang and Weisman (South Econ J 71:821–836, 2005), that focuses on compensated transfers, to allow for non-compensated transfers à la Buchanan (J Law Econ 26:71–85, 1983) and derives results for the case in which children’s time contributions as perceived by their parents are a merit good (e.g., service), pure waste (e.g., bugging), or a mix of both. For an increase in the proportion of time contributions that are pure waste, parents find it optimal to reduce the size of an overall transfer, thereby lowering the levels of wasteful rent-seeking activities by their children within the family.

Ethnic and parental effects on schooling outcomes before and during the transition: evidence from the Baltic countries

This paper examines human capital gap between titular ethnicities and Russian-speaking minorities, which has emerged in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania during the transition and remains significant after controlling for parental education. For recent cohorts, unexplained gap is declining in Lithuania (despite absence of Russian language tertiary education) and in Estonia. Furthermore, we investigate intergenerational mobility in the Baltic countries. Parental education has a strong positive effect on propensity to obtain tertiary education, both in the Soviet era and post-Soviet period. Transition to the market has weakened mother’s education effect for titular ethnicities, while the opposite is true for minorities.

The influence of wages on parents’ allocations of time to child care and market work in the United Kingdom

We use time-diary data on couples with children from the 2000 United Kingdom Time Use Survey to examine the impacts of own and partner’s wages on parents’ provision of child care and market work on weekdays and on weekends and holidays. We find that increases in partners’ wages increase women’s primary care on all days and decrease their market work on weekdays, while increases in women’s own wages increase their market work on weekdays. There is little evidence that men’s time use responds to changes in their own wages. However, an increase in men’s partners’ wages increases men’s passive child-care time on weekends and reduces their market-work time on weekends.

The educational attainment of second-generation mainland Chinese immigrants in Taiwan

The social status and well-being of political immigrants’ children are seldom touched upon in literature. This paper focuses on the impact of refugee experience on the relative educational attainment of second-generation immigrants in Taiwan. In contrast with the results in van Ours and Veenman (J Popul Econ 16(4):739–753, 2003) and Riphahn (J Popul Econ 16(4):711–737, 2003) who showed that second-generation immigrants lag behind their native counterparts, this paper’s principle finding is that the father’s immigration status can help his children achieve a higher educational qualification than native Taiwanese after controlling the relevant determinants of educational attainment, including parental background and the neighborhood where the interviewee grows up. In addition, women born in the earlier cohort benefit more by their fathers’ immigration status than their male counterparts do. However, Taiwanese schooling advances across generations are impressive, whereby the gap in schooling attainment between second-generation immigrants and native Taiwanese is found to decline over time.

How Can Children Tell Us About Their Wellbeing? Exploring the Potential of Participatory Research Approaches within <Emphasis Type="Italic">Young Lives</Emphasis>

‘Wellbeing’ is a key concept in the study of children’s lives over time, given its potential to link the objective, subjective, and inter-subjective dimensions of their experiences in ways that are holistic, contextualized and longitudinal. For this reason wellbeing is one of the core concepts used by Young Lives, a 15-year project (2000–2015) that follows the lives of 12,000 children growing up in the context of poverty in Ethiopia, Peru, Vietnam and Andhra Pradesh (India) (see ). This paper examines a selection of methods being used by Young Lives to capture aspects of child wellbeing in the context of a range of children’s life experiences related to poverty, specific risks and protective processes. It draws on a review of the literature on child-focused methods and on recent experiences piloting three core qualitative methods in the four study countries. The paper reports the development of a methodology that is child-centred, but also acknowledges that every child is embedded within a network of social and economic relationships.