Family leave policies and women's retention after childbirth: Evidence from the United States, Britain, and Japan

This paper uses labour force survey data to examine the employment rates and employment decisions of women with young children in the United States, Britain and Japan. Our results confirm that young children have a very strong negative effect on women's employment; this effect is most pronounced in Britain. We then take advantage of panel data to investigate the effects of family leave coverage on women's job retention after childbirth. We find that family leave coverage increases the likelihood that a woman will return to her employer after childbirth in all three countries, with a particularly marked effect in Japan. This result suggests that the recent expansions in family leave coverage in the sample countries are likely to lead to increased employment of women after childbirth. Received: 10 July 1997/Accepted: 8 June 1998     

Migration and relationship power among mexican women

Our study drew on original data collected in Durham, NC, and four sending communities in Mexico to examine differences in women's relationship power that are associated with migration and residence in the United States. We analyzed the personal, relationship, and social resources that condition the association between migration and women's power and the usefulness of the Relationship Control Scale (RCS) for capturing these effects. We found support for perspectives that emphasize that migration may simultaneously mitigate and reinforce gender inequities. Relative to their nonmigrant peers, Mexican women in the United States average higher emotional consonance with their partners, but lower relationship control and sexual negotiation power. Methodologically, we found that the RCS is internally valid and useful for measuring the impact of resources on women's power. However, the scale appears to combine diverse dimensions of relationship power that were differentially related to migration in our study.     

A longitudinal analysis of family migration and the gender gap in earnings in the united states and great britain

This article uses longitudinal data for the United States and Great Britain to examine the impact of residential mobility and childbirth on the earnings of women, their family earnings, and the related division of earnings by gender. This project is the _ rst to compare explicitly the impact of childbirth and family migration on women’s earnings, and it extends prior cross-sectional and longitudinal studies on isolated countries by providing a direct contrast between two major industrialized nations, using comparable measures. The results indicate that families respond in similar ways in both countries to migration and childbirth. In response to both migration and childbirth, women’s earnings fall at the time of the event and recover slowly afterward, but the magnitude of the impact is roughly twice as large for childbirth as for migration. However, migration but not the birth of a child is also associated with a significant increase in total family earnings because of increased husbands’ earnings. As a result, the effect of migration on the relative earnings of wives to husbands is similar to the effect of childbirth. These results suggest that family migration should be given consideration in the literature on the gender earnings gap.     

Migration distances: An international comparison

Comparing the level or amount of migration within different countries has been a longstanding problem because the local administrative areas commonly used as the basis for measuring migration vary greatly in size and significance within and between countries. Distance moved is a critical aspect of most concepts of migration, and measuring it would facilitate cross-national comparisons. Apparently only the United States, Great Britain, and Sweden have measured migration distances for the country as a whole, and this information is used as the basis for comparative analysis of spatial mobility.     

On the auspices of female migration from Mexico to the United States

In this paper we examine the circumstances and determinants of female migration between Mexico and the United States. Using data from the Mexican Migration Project, we considered the relative timing of males' and females' moves northward. We then estimated logit and probit models to study the determinants of male and female out-migration; among women we also estimated a multinomial logit model to uncover differences in the process of migration for work versus not for work. We found that women almost always followed other family members, either the husband or a parent; only a tiny minority initiated migration independently. Although males also are quite likely to be introduced to migration by a parent, nearly half of all male migrants left for the United States before or without a wife or a parent. Estimates of the determinants of migration suggested that males move for employment, whereas wives generally are motivated by family reasons. Daughters, however, display a greater propensity to move for work, and the determinants of their work-related moves closely resemble those of sons and fathers.     

The Relevance of the 'Easterlin hypothesis' and the 'new home economics' to fertility movements in Great Britain

Summary The hypothesis that a family's economic status relative to its aspirations (relative economic status) is an important determinant of its fertility behaviour has been developed and applied to the explanation of swings in American fertility by R. A. Easterlin. However, a recent application by Butz and Ward of a model derived from the 'new home economics' (pioneered by Becker and Mincer) strongly suggests that relative economic status is not the dominant factor in explaining fertility movements in the U.S.A. Rather, both current men's and women's wages operate independently in explaining the movement in fertility, and in particular the decline in fertility is attributed to rising women's wages. In this paper we explore the relevance of both the Easterlin hypothesis and the hypotheses derived from the 'new home economics' to the 1955-75 fertility swing in Great Britain. We find that we must reject the Easterlin hypothesis on the basis of the measures of relative economic status suggested by Easterlin and Wachter. A variant of the Easterlin hypothesis suggested by Oppenheimer does receive some support from the available evidence, and the evidence provides strong support for the model of fertility behaviour derived from the 'new home economics', which emphasizes the distinction between the effects of changes in men's and women's real wages on fertility decisions. The cause of the fertility decline is attributed to rising women's wages and employment opportunities through their direct effect on the opportunity cost of time and children among working wives and through their effect on the labour force participation of married women of childbearing age. The test of this model and the estimates of its parameters are not definitive, however, because of deficiencies in the data and problems of statistical estimation. We nevertheless conclude that both this model and the Oppenheimer variant of the Easterlin hypothesis, as well as other elements of a more comprehensive economic theory of fertility, point to a continuation of low fertility and the possibility of a secular decline with fertility approaching some lower asymptote.     

Economic opportunity in mexico and return migration from the United States

I analyze the influence of the economic characteristics of origin area on trip duration for Mexican migrants in the United States. I argue that migrants from economically dynamic areas in Mexico with favorable opportunities for employment and small capital investment have a larger incentive to stay in the United States longer and to withstand the psychic costs of separation from family and friends than do migrants from economically stagnant areas in Mexico, where the productive uses of savings are severely limited. In line with this argument we should expect investment opportunities in migrants’ origin areas to be associated positively with migrants’ trip duration in the United States. To test this hypothesis I use individual- and household-level data on U.S migration experience collected in 13 Mexican communities. Evidence from parametric hazards models supports the idea that economic characteristics of origin areas influence the motivations and strategies of Mexican migrants in the United States.     

Different Reasons,Different Results: Implications of Migration by Gender and Family Status

Previous research on migration and gendered career outcomes centers on couples and rarely examines the reason for the move. The implicit assumption is usually that households migrate in response to job opportunities. Based on a two-year panel from the Current Population Survey, this article uses stated reasons for geographic mobility to compare earnings outcomes among job migrants, family migrants, and quality-of-life migrants by gender and family status. We further assess the impact of migration on couples’ internal household economy. The effects of job-related moves that we find are reduced substantially in the fixed-effects models, indicating strong selection effects. Married women who moved for family reasons experience significant and substantial earnings declines. Consistent with conventional models of migration, we find that household earnings and income and gender specialization increase following job migration. Married women who are secondary earners have increased odds of reducing their labor supply following migration for job or family reasons. However, we also find that migrating women who contributed as equals to the household economy before the move are no more likely than nonmigrant women to exit work or to work part-time. Equal breadwinner status may protect women from becoming tied movers.     

Welfare reform and interstate migration of poor families

The thesis of this study is that as a result of increased inequalities in welfare rules, the 1996 welfare reform act not only enhanced incentives for poor families to move but also (and perhaps more important) created disincentives for them to stay in "race to the bottom" states. In testing this thesis, we evaluated the mediating and moderating roles of state economic development and family structure. We merged data from three main sources: the 1996-1999 panel of the Survey of Income and Program Participation, the Urban Institute's Welfare Rules Database, and state economic data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Modeling both destination (pull) and departure (push) effects of welfare policy measures and selected covariates in a nested discrete-time event-history migration analysis, we found robust support for the thesis that stringency in state welfare-eligibility and behavior-related rules stimulated interstate out-migration of poor families in the United States. However poor families were not drawn to states with relatively more-lenient welfare rules, although stringency in state welfare dollar benefits inhibited in-migration and state unemployment patterns may have conditioned the migration effects of welfare-reform rules on the choice of destination. Single mothers were not more directly affected by welfare-eligibility and behavior-related rules than were poor married couples.     

Immigration and status exchange in Australia and the United States

This paper evaluates the status exchange hypothesis for Australia and the United States, two Anglophone nations with long immigration traditions whose admission regimes place different emphases on skills. Using log-linear methods, we demonstrate that foreign-born spouses trade educational credentials via marriage with natives in both Australian and U.S. marriage markets and, moreover, that nativity is a more salient marriage barrier for men than for women. With some exceptions, immigrant spouses in mixed nativity couples are better educated than native spouses in same nativity couples, but status exchange is more prevalent among the less-educated spouses in both countries. Support for the status exchange hypothesis is somewhat weaker in Australia partly because of lower average levels of education compared with the United States and partly because of the less sharply defined educational hierarchy at the postsecondary level.     

The impact of U.S. immigration upon internal migration

The potential adverse effect of immigrants on job opportunities for natives continues to influence debate about immigration policy in the United States. Many studies have examined wage and employment outcomes; by contrast, we examine internal migration. We ask whether or not natives are more likely to depart from or less likely to move to metropolitan areas with high concentrations of immigrants. After controlling for other influences on migration, we find that metropolitan areas with higher concentrations of immigrants have only slightly lower rates of inmigration of natives. Such metropolitan areas also exhibit slightly lower rates of out-migration, contrary to expectation. These results suggest that the effect of immigrants on labor market redistribution of natives is modest.Research reported here was supported by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. We would like to thank Kofi Benefo for helpful comments.     

Do conditional cash transfers influence migration? A study using experimental data from the Mexican progresa program

Prior research on Mexican migration has shown that social networks and economic incentives play an important role in determining migration outcomes. We use experimental data from PROGRESA, Mexico's primary poverty-reduction program, to evaluate the effects of conditional cash transfers on migration both domestically and to the United States. Our study complements a growing body of literature aimed at overcoming longstanding hurdles to the establishment of causal validity in empirical studies of migration. Analysis based on the data collected before and after the program's onset shows that conditional transfers reduce U.S. migration but not domestic migration. The data also enable us to explore the role of existing family and community migration networks. The results show that migration networks strongly influence migration, but that the effect of conditional transfers on migration is apparently not mediated by existing migration network structures. Our results suggest that conditional transfers may be helpful in managing rural out-migration, particularly to the United States.     

Women's labor force transitions in connection with childbirth: a panel data comparison between Germany,Sweden and Great Britain

In this paper we make use of the panel aspects of the German GSOEP, the Swedish HUS and the British BHPS data. In these data sets we known month and year of childbirth and the month to month labor force status of the mother also before giving birth. This permits analysis of labor force transitions triggered by child births of different birth orders. From macro data Swedish women are known to have the highest labor force participation. The difference in total labor force participation of women is totally a result of fewer mothers entering the labor force and entering later in Germany and Great Britain than in Sweden. This paper shows that before birth of first child there is no such difference. We find that German and British women have even higher full-time labor force participation than Swedish women 12 months before the birth of the first child. The difference is more pronounced for second and third births than for first births. We suggest that these differences are caused by different family policy regimes where Germany can be characterized as a breadwinner regime and Sweden a regime oriented towards equal role sharing of father and mother. Our results on determinants of being in the labor force both after and before the birth of a child as well as determinants of the tempo of entering the labor force after birth shows that women's own human capital is important both in Germany and Great Britain, whereas in Sweden also less educated women have entered the labor force by the time the child is 2 years old.All correspondence to Cécile Wetzels. We are grateful to Andrew McCulloch from ESRC Research Centre on Micro-Social Change in Britain, who delivered the British BHPS-data. We also want to thank John F. Ermisch, Siv Gustafsson, Diane Sainsbury and two anonymous referees for useful comments. Financial support has been received by the Swedish Council in the Humanities and Social Sciences and the EU Human Capital and Mobility (HCM) network for the Female Labour Force Participation Network within which framework this analysis has been carried out. Responsible editors: S. S. Gustafsson, John R Ermisch.     

Race,Place, and Veteran Status: Migration among Black and White Men, 1940–2000

In this paper, I gauge the impact of veteran status on migration probabilities for black and white men in the late 20th century United States, comparing cohorts that were subject to various military staffing policies. I find that white veterans are more likely than are white non-veterans to live outside the state of their birth and to have recently migrated. These effects persist regardless of whether veterans were subject to the draft or the All Volunteer Force staffing policy, and are durable across the life course. Among blacks, elevated rates of veterans’ migration are first observed in 1980. These results illuminate a previously unidentified consequence of veteran status, and may point to a policy-linked mechanism through which prior military employment influences social mobility, the American labor force is redistributed, and the racial composition of states and localities is altered.     

Internal migration age patterns and the transition to adulthood: Australia and Great Britain compared

Life-course transitions are important drivers of mobility, resulting in a concentration of migration at young adult ages. While there is increasing evidence of cross-national variations in the ages at which young adults move, the relative importance of various key life-course transitions in shaping these differences remains poorly understood. Prior studies typically focus on a single country and examine the influence of a single transition on migration, independently from other life-course events. To better understand the determinants of cross-national variations in migration ages, this paper analyses for Australia and Great Britain the joint influence of five key life-course transitions on migration: (1) higher education entry, (2) labour force entry, (3) partnering, (4) marriage and (5) family formation. We first characterise the age profile of short- and long-distance migration and the age profile of life-course transitions. We then use event-history analysis to establish the relative importance of each life-course transitions on migration. Our results show that the age structure and the relative importance of life-course transitions vary across countries, shaping differences in migration age patterns. In Great Britain, the strong association of migration with multiple transitions explains the concentration of migration at young adult ages, which is further amplified by the age-concentration and alignment of multiple transitions at similar ages. By contrast in Australia a weaker influence of life-course transitions on migration, combined with a dispersion of entry into higher education across a wide age range, contribute to a protracted migration age profile. Comparison by distance moved reveals further differences in the mix of transitions driving migration in each country, confirming the impact of the life-course in shaping migration age patterns.     

往复式流动还是永久性回流：农村女性就业流动性差异及决定因素研究

通过在湖北省调查的2883个农村女性劳动力样本,首先描述分析了选择往复式流动和永久性回流的农村女性的人口学特征差异,然后利用Logistic方法实证分析了人力资本变量、社会资本变量和家庭禀赋变量对农村女性做出往复式流动和永久性回流决策的影响。研究发现,往复式流动决策的做出主要受女性自身人力资本变量的影响,而永久性回流决策受三类变量的共同影响。女性年龄对于往复式流动有正向作用,对永久性回流起反向作用,受教育年限对往复式流动起反向作用。对永久性回流的作用则相反。     

Changes in women’s postmarital employment in Japan and Taiwan

Research on female labor-force participation has not fully explained why economic development has different effects on married women's employment continuity across societies. I use life-history data from nationally representative samples of women in Japan and Taiwan to examine the divergence in women's patterns of labor-force exit in these two countries during the postwar period. The findings reveal that the effects of family demands, occupation, firm size, and employment sector on women's exit rates differed substantially between Japan and Taiwan. Taken together, these factors account for the different trends in married women's employment during this period. I argue that the cross-national differences in the predictors of women's labor-force withdrawal reflect the extent of incompatibility between work and family responsibilities for married women in these two societies.     

A New Approach to the Study of Tolerance: Conceptualizing and Measuring Acceptance,Respect, and Appreciation of Difference

Previous empirical research on tolerance suffers from a number of shortcomings, the most serious being the conceptual and operational conflation of (in)tolerance and prejudice. We design research to remedy this. First, we contribute to the literature by advancing research that distinguishes analytically between the two phenomena. We conceptualize tolerance as a value orientation towards difference. This definition—which is abstract and does not capture attitudes towards specific out-groups, ideas, or behaviors—allows for the analysis of tolerance within and between societies. Second, we improve the measurement of tolerance by developing survey items that are consistent with this conceptualization. We administer two surveys, one national (Sweden) and one cross-national (Australia, Denmark, Great Britain, Sweden, and the United States). Results from structural equation models show that tolerance is best understood as a three-dimensional concept, which includes acceptance of, respect for, and appreciation of difference. Analyses show that measures of tolerance have metric invariance across countries, and additional tests demonstrate convergent and discriminant validity. We also assess tolerance’s relationship to prejudice and find that only an appreciation of difference has the potential to reduce prejudice. We conclude that it is not only possible to measure tolerance in a way that is distinct from prejudice but also necessary if we are to understand the causes and consequences of tolerance.

     

Cohort size and earnings in Great Britain

Numerous studies in the United States have confirmed that individuals born into large cohorts, ceteris paribus, tend to have lower earnings on entry into the labour force compared to individuals born into small cohorts. On the other hand, only limited attention has been directed towards exploring the relationship between cohort size and earnings in other nations. This paper examines empirically the relationship between cohort size and male earnings in Great Britain. The data used is a time-series of cross-sections (1973–1982) constructed from theGeneral Household Survey. Some support for the hypothesis that large cohorts have depressed earnings is found. However, this effect does not persist as the cohort ages.     

From austerity to prosperity? Migration and child poverty among mainland and island Puerto Ricans

Analyses of migrants' economic circumstances typically use the native-born in the destination as a comparison group. We use the 1990 Census Public Use Microdata Samples for the United States and Puerto Rico to demonstrate the benefits of a comparative approach that includes data from both the origin and the destination. Specifically, the primary objective is to determine how and why the risk of child poverty is associated with migration from Puerto Rico to the United States. The results show that migration reduces the risk of child poverty, partly because better jobs are available on the mainland. Employment, human capital, family structure, and public assistance cannot completely explain observed differences. The results also show that the economic benefits of migration continue for the native-born on the mainland and that return migration to Puerto Rico is associated with impoverishment.