Gender Bias in Parental Leave: Evidence from Sweden

This paper estimates the effect of child gender on mothers’ and fathers’ parental leave using population-wide register data from Statistics Sweden and the Swedish Social Insurance Agency. The results showed that a first-born son increased fathers’ parental leave with 0.6 days (1.5 %) and decreased mothers’ leave by a similar amount. Both the sign and size of this effect is in line with previous research, showing that these types of biases exist also in a society with top ratings on gender equality. However, non-traditional families, with high maternal relative earnings and/or educational levels, showed even larger gender biases which suggest that it may be mothers, rather than fathers, that are the driving force behind this child gender bias.     

Unemployment and Health in Sweden: Public Issues and Private Troubles

The unemployment rate for a country seems to reflect unemployment policies rather than economic conditions. Variations in employment rates for selected Western countries are presented as a background for a discussion of unemployment and its individual and societal consequences in Sweden. Unemployment is both a private trouble—where individuals see the possibility of controlling their own lives diminishing, which leads to increased risk for psychological and physiological stress—and a public issue, for increased unemployment is associated with societal vulnerability, social polarization, and the breakdown of community ties, which lead to increased societal stress and increased mortality on the national and the community levels. However, for the large majority of workers, the Swedish welfare system buffers first against unemployment, and second against its negative economic effects. Less than 2% of the workforce are exposed to unemployment, and a minority of the unemployed seem negatively affected by the unemployment experience. An empirical longitudinal study of unemployed blue-collar workers and two employed control groups indicated that a coping orientation involving an attitude of mastery or perceived control buffered against psychological and physiological stress reactions.     

The independence condition in the theory of social choice

Arrow's theorem is really a theorem about the independence condition. In order to show the very crucial role that this condition plays, the theorem is proved in a refined version, where the use of the Pareto condition is almost avoided.A distinction is made between group preference functions and group decision functions, yielding respectively preference relations and optimal subsets as values. Arrow's theorem is about the first kind, but some ambiguities and mistakes in his book are explained if we assume that he was really thinking of decision functions. The trouble then is that it is not clear how to formulate the independence condition for decision functions. Therefore the next step is to analyse Arrow's argument for accepting the independence condition.The most frequent ambiguity depends on an interpretation of A as the set of all conceivable alternatives, while the variable subset B is the set of all feasible or available alternatives. He then argues that preferences between alternatives that are not feasible shall not influence the choice from the set of available alternatives. But even if this principle is accepted, it only forces us to require independence with respect to some specific set B and not to every B simultaneously. Therefore the independence condition cannot be accepted on these grounds.Another argument is about an election where one of the candidates dies. On one interpretation this argument can be taken to support an independence requirement which leads to a contradiction. On another interpretation it is a condition about connexions between choices from different sets.The so-called problem of binary choice is found to be different from the independence problem and it plays no essential role in Arrow's impossibility result. Other impossibility results by Sen, Batra and Pattanaik and by Schwartz are of a different character.In the last section, several weaker independence conditions are presented. Their relations to Arrow's condition are stated and the arguments supporting them are discussed.     

Alcohol-related problems among adolescents and the role of a sense of coherence

Alcohol abuse is generally regarded as a major risk factor for antisocial problem behaviour among adolescents. On the other hand, personal coping strategies hypothetically can be seen as protective of alcohol-related behaviour problems. The aim of this study was to examine the influence of sense of coherence (SOC) on alcohol-related behavioural problems in an SOC-alcohol intoxication model. The method of study was a cross-sectional, school-based questionnaire study of 4,305, 16- and 19-year-old adolescents. We found that both a SOC and the frequency of alcohol intoxication were independently associated with alcohol-related behavioural problems. Our model shows that the combination of these two independent factors amplifies them considerably, and adolescents with a strong SOC, despite frequent intoxication, were protected to a large degree from experiencing alcohol-related problems.