Longevity and Lifespan Variation by Educational Attainment in Spain: 1960–2015

For a long time, studies of socioeconomic gradients in health have limited their attention to between-group comparisons. Yet, ignoring the differences that might exist within groups and focusing on group-specific life expectancy levels and trends alone, one might arrive at overly simplistic conclusions. Using data from the Spanish Encuesta Sociodemográfica and recently released mortality files by the Spanish Statistical Office (INE), this is the first study to simultaneously document (1) the gradient in life expectancy by educational attainment groups, and (2) the inequality in age-at-death distributions within and across those groups for the period between 1960 and 2015 in Spain. Our findings suggest that life expectancy has been increasing for all education groups but particularly among the highly educated. We observe diverging trends in life expectancy, with the differences between the low- and highly educated becoming increasingly large, particularly among men. Concomitantly with increasing disparities across groups, length-of-life inequality has decreased for the population as a whole and for most education groups, and the contribution of the between-group component of inequality to overall inequality has been extremely small. Even if between-group inequality has increased over time, its contribution has been too small to have sizable effects on overall inequality. In addition, our results suggest that education expansion and declining within-group variability might have been the main drivers of overall lifespan inequality reductions. Nevertheless, the diverging trends in longevity and lifespan inequality across education groups represent an important phenomenon whose underlying causes and potential implications should be investigated in detail.     

Welfare and the Children of Immigrants: Transmission of Dependence or Investment in the Future?

The public concern that immigrant families might be using a disproportionate share of social benefits and transmitting some form of public dependency to their children, combined with the rising levels of immigrants entering the country, fueled the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in 1996, which limited public assistance to many immigrant families. This paper uses the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 to explore the association between exposure to welfare and young adult outcomes of high school graduation, college enrollment and labor force participation with a focus on parental nativity status as well as broad country of origin group. Results indicate a persistent negative association between welfare legacy and high school graduation; a negative association that is most pronounced for children of natives. Results also show the largest positive effect of welfare receipt among the most disadvantaged group, the young adult children of immigrants from Mexican and Central American countries. The main finding of this study suggests that the negative impacts of welfare receipt might be lessened and in some cases reversed among the young adults from immigrant families. Such findings challenge the common notion that immigrant families use welfare as a crutch across generations and raise serious concern about U.S. immigration and welfare policies.     

Mismatch in the Norwegian Labour Market 2003–2013: Did Immigrants Make a Difference?

For the Norwegian economy, 2003–2013 was a period of large growth and big business cycle fluctuations. The aggregate uv-curve reflects this and shows a reduction in both the vacancy rate and the unemployment rate from 2003 to 2013, suggesting improved labour market matching over the period. The inclusion of Eastern European countries in the European Union in 2004 and 2007 caused an increasing influx of foreign job seekers. I quantify regional and occupational mismatch, and make a distinction between natives and immigrants. Indicators show no reduction in mismatch over time, which therefore cannot account for the increased labour market efficiency that the uv-curve suggests. However, ‘footloose’ immigrants seem to have adapted better than ‘rooted’ natives to the structure of labour demand in the regional dimension, and thus to have contributed to a lower level of mismatch than would have resulted without immigrants. In the occupational dimension immigrants made no significant difference. Levels and differences in employment and unemployment among and between immigrants and natives were not well explained by their education levels or types.     

Does Culture Affect Divorce? Evidence From European Immigrants in the United States

This article explores the role of culture in determining divorce by examining country-of-origin differences in divorce rates of immigrants in the United States. Because childhood-arriving immigrants are all exposed to a common set of U.S. laws and institutions, we interpret relationships between their divorce tendencies and home-country divorce rates as evidence of the effect of culture. Our results are robust to controlling for several home-country variables, including average church attendance and gross domestic product (GDP). Moreover, specifications with country-of-origin fixed effects suggest that immigrants from countries with low divorce rates are especially less likely to be divorced if they reside among a large number of coethnics. Supplemental analyses indicate that divorce culture has a stronger impact on the divorce decisions of females than of males, pointing to a potentially gendered nature of divorce taboos.     

Who’s Afraid of the Beast in the Jamesian Closet?

Building on the Foucauldian insight that sexuality is a discourse and thereby refusing to be chained to the Freudian repressive hypothesis, this article aims to ascertain how the closet is made and how the homosexual comes to be seen in the act of reading the literary text “The Beast in the Jungle,” written by Henry James. It will examine the power relationships between the characters and between the narrator and the reader, surrounding the protagonist’s sexual secret, which is linked to fear.     

Does Human Capital Raise Earnings for Immigrants in the Low-Skill Labor Market?

We use monthly Survey of Income and Program Participation data from 1996–1999 and 2001–2003 to estimate the determinants of differentiation in intercepts and slopes for age/earnings profiles of low-skill immigrant and native male workers. Our findings provide further depth of understanding to the“mixed” picture of earnings determination in the low-skill labor market that has been reported by others. On the positive side, many immigrants are employed in similar occupations and industries as natives. Both groups show substantial wage gains over time and generally receive similar returns to years of schooling completed. Immigrants also receive substantial returns to acculturation, measured as age at arrival and English language skill. These results cast doubt on the strong version of segmented labor market theory, in which low-skill immigrants are permanently consigned to dead-end jobs with no wage appreciation. On the negative side, immigrants earn approximately 24% less than natives and are less likely to occupy supervisory and managerial jobs. Latino immigrants receive lower returns to education than do white immigrants. Furthermore, age at arrival and language ability do not explain the lower returns to education experienced by Latino immigrants. These results suggest that Latino immigrants in particular may suffer from barriers to mobility and/or wage discrimination. Whether these negative labor market experiences occur primarily for illegal immigrants remains unknown.     

Who Stays? Who Goes? Selective Emigration Among the Foreign-Born

We investigate the level and selectivity of emigration from the United States among foreign-born adults. We use the CPS Matching Method (Van Hook et al. 2006) to estimate the probability of emigration among foreign-born adults aged 18–34, 35–64 and 65+ from 1996 to 2009 (N = 92,852). The results suggest higher levels of emigration than used in the production of official population estimates. Also, indicators of economic integration (home ownership, school enrollment, poverty) and social ties in the U.S. (citizenship, having young children, longer duration in the United States) deter emigration. Conversely, having connections with the sending society, such as living apart from a spouse, was associated with emigration, particularly among Mexican men. Health was least strongly related to emigration. Simulations suggest that selective emigration may alter the home ownership and marital status, but not health, composition of immigrant cohorts. The implications for public policy are discussed.     

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.

Is Over-Education a Problem in Spain? Empirical Evidence Based on the EU-SILC

Spain is suffering an important economic slowdown which affects significantly to unemployment rises. For this reason, many individuals are considering to increase their educational level. However, this decision can lead to get worse labor market indicators. In this paper, we analyze the problem of over-education in Spain and its effect on earnings. Using the last four waves (2009–2012) of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC, 2009–2012) this study analyses over-education situation of employed people and compares over-education rates and earnings of these individuals. Cross-sectional analysis (focused on a recent period of time) is performed. We apply different matching techniques based on propensity score methods to evaluate the impact of over-education on personal earnings. The results obtained in this paper add more empirical evidence supporting the effect of education on earnings together with occupational placement because over-education could be a great problem for many countries. In Spain, there exists a problem of over-education which varies among occupations. Overeducated workers are most likely to be found among “Service workers and shop and market sales workers” and “Elementary occupations”. Also, the majority of individuals working as “Professionals” are adequately educated. Besides, over-education has a significant negative impact on earnings. Although the results depend on the way we define over-education (interval or modal method), those individuals over-educated receive less earnings than they correspond to. In fact, the decrease can reach about 5000 euro per year.     

Who should invest in specific training?

We study experimentally whether employers or workers should invest in specific training. Workers have an alternative trading opportunity that takes the form of either an outside option or a threat point. Theory predicts that with outside options, employers have (weakly) better investment incentives than workers do and should therefore be the investing party. With threat points, employers and workers are predicted to invest the same. Our results are, by and large, in line with these predictions. Due to offsetting inefficiencies in the bargaining stage, however, realized inefficiencies are remarkably similar across the different situations considered.

Overeducation of Young Workers in Spain: How Much Does the First Job Matter? Social Indicators Research

This article contributes to recent overeducation literature on the impact of an initial education mismatch on workers’ future careers. Specifically, using the 2009 ad-hoc module of the Spanish Labour Force Survey, we quantify the differences in the probability of overeducation depending on the quality of individuals’ first match. To do this, we apply an extension of the recursive bivariate probit model, which allows potential endogeneity problems to be taken into account, as well as a dissimilar impact of the initial match for workers with different educational attainment. The results indicate that overeducation is a trap, since young workers who were mismatched in their first job are 40.2 percentage points more likely to be overeducated in a later one than those who were not. When decomposing this difference in two parts, one related to the pure effect of the initial mismatch and another one related to workers’ characteristics, we conclude that the pure effect is more important, and it depends on educational attainment.     

The Transition to a Coresidential Partnership: Who Moves and Who Has the Partner Move In?

Population Research and Policy Review - Moving into a joint household is an important step in the process of union formation. While a growing body of literature investigates differences between...     

Who Takes the Lead Hand? Correlates of Handholding Position in Lesbian Couples

When couples hold hands, one partner must take the lead hand and the other the following hand position. As potential correlates or predictors of handholding positions within lesbian couples, this article explored differences in height, age, income, who initiated the relationship, who usually initiates sexual intimacy, previous history of partnership with a male, and who has the most “say” in decision-making. Data revealed only 2 significant variables: The taller partner was more likely to have the lead hand, and a woman who had previously been partnered with a male was more likely to take the trailing hand position.     

Gender Disparities in Educational Trajectories in India: Do Females Become More Robust at Higher Levels?

Studies on educational attainments have tended to focus on attainments at a specific level of education. The change in disparities in attainment over the educational life cycle, however, has been neglected in literature—in India, for instance, the only exceptions are Vaid (2004) and Desai and Kulkarni (2008). This paper uses unit level National Sample Survey data (2004–2005) to examine gender disparities at different educational levels up to the high school level. Bi-variate analysis of gender disparities computed using the Sopher-Kundu index indicates that although there are substantial gender disparities at lower levels of education, this gets reversed at higher levels in several states. At the all-India level, too, in recent years, a reversal of disparity may be observed in urban areas. Econometric analysis using the variable parameter variant of the generalized ordered logit model reveals that robustness of females increase over the educational life cycle, though disparity remains, after controlling for socio-economic traits.     

Deciphering the ‘Ethnic Penalty’ of Immigrants in Western Europe: A Cross-Classified Multilevel Analysis

While most previous research on immigrants’ assimilation refers to the residual disadvantage that remains in empirical analyses of economic outcomes as a general ‘ethnic penalty’, this current paper disentangles the ‘ethnic penalty’ by dividing it into four components: individual characteristics, country characteristics, the social environment in host country, and the policy environment in host country. This study tests the effects of these four components on three economic outcomes: employment, labor force participation, and household income. Data from the European Social Survey, the Migrant Integration Policy Index, the UN, and the World Bank are integrated here. Findings show that the main reasons for immigrants’ disadvantage in terms of labor force participation and household income are both origin and host country characteristics, while the effects of ethnic origins, social exclusion, and policies are weaker. However, ethnic origins and social exclusion actually play a central role in determining unemployment of immigrants.     

Just Like in Their Home Country? A Multinational Perspective on Living Arrangements of Older Immigrants in the United States

Older immigrants are more likely to share residence with their adult children and other family members than are U.S.-born older adults. Because socioeconomic factors only partially explain these differences and direct measures of cultural preferences are seldom available, the persistently high rates of intergenerational coresidence among the older foreign-born are often interpreted as driven by cultural preferences and/or a lack of assimilation. To challenge this interpretation, this study investigates the extent to which older immigrants’ living arrangements deviate from those of older adults in their home countries. The analysis combines data on immigrants from the 2008–2012 American Community Survey (ACS) with census data from three major immigrant-sending countries: Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and Vietnam. Despite persistent differences from U.S.-born whites, coresidence in later life is significantly less common than in the sending countries among the older foreign-born who migrated as young adults, and especially among those who migrated as children. The older foreign-born who migrated after age 50, however, are more likely to coreside and less likely to live independently than the older adults in their home countries. The similarity of these patterns across the three immigrant subgroups suggests that the unusually high coresidence among late-life immigrants is driven by U.S. family reunification policy and not simply by cultural influences.