The Differential Impact of a Plant Closing on the Reemployment and Income Patterns of Displaced Blue- and White-Collar Employees

Abstract

In recent years social scientists have turned their attention to the impact of plant closings on displaced employees, but few studies have examined employees displaced in large-scale shutdowns in markets saturated with high unemployment, or groups other than white “prime age” male production workers. The present study examines the reemployment and income effects of displacement on a population of 3,596 factory production workers, managerial and clerical/technical employees, and includes women as well as men, all of whom were displaced in a single large-scale plant closing. A telephone survey of 555 subjects produced a response rate in excess of 90%. The actual postdisplacement reemployment experience of these employees is described and compared, as are their subsequent income levels. Regression analysis is used to test whether the hypothesized factors of age, sex, education, seniority and subsequent reemployment experience successfully predict the degree of income loss for the sample as a whole as well as the three subsamples.     

WILLINGNESS TOUPEE

In this paper we tackle the hairy problem of male pattern baldness. We survey balding men and elicit their willingness to pay to move from their current situation to a more plentiful one. Then we comb‐over the results. What's the average willingness to pay to move from a glistening cue ball to a luscious mane? About $30,000. (JEL B12)     

Beyond household walls: the spatial structure of American extended kinship networks

ABSTRACT

How far do Americans live from their close and extended kin? The answer is likely to structure the types of social, instrumental, and financial support that they are able to provide to one another. Based on the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, kin pairs vary widely in odds of household co-residence, co-residence in the same administrative units, and inter-tract distances if they do not live in the same census tract. Multivariate regression tests show that family structure, educational attainment, and age are closely associated with kin proximity. Fixed-effects models demonstrate that family formation shapes spatial relations between kin.     

Links Between Demographic and Kinship Transitions

The demographic transition is also a kinship transition. This insight is obvious for certain types of kin—as fertility falls, parents have fewer children, for instance—but its broader implications for communities remain unexplored. Prior work on this topic has focused on how the demographic transition reshapes the availability of living kin within a society over time to the neglect of how differences in the demographic transition lead to differences in kinship networks between communities. In this article, I examine survey data (for rural Thailand) and use microsimulation methods to test how different pathways through the demographic transition affect kinship networks in communities. My results show that different routes through the demographic transition can substantially alter kinship network size and, entirely through the mechanism of demographic change, have indirect effects on community integration. These effects persist long after the demographic transition has ended. I theorize reasons that community‐level differentiation in kinship networks owing to the demographic transition are an important mechanism linking the demographic transition to modernity.     

Transcending a Double Bind: The Case of Jenna

Although all women's career development has been largely ignored, gifted women, in particular, have been virtually invisible within the career field. Many people assume that choosing a career should be easy for women with high intelligence and multiple gifts; however, the challenges to occupational choice for gifted women are frequently amplified because they are expected to use their talents while conforming to societal expectations of them as women. In this article, the authors seek to enhance awareness of some of these issues by first discussing one gifted woman's difficulties and then addressing treatment issues, using an ecological perspective.     

Social and spatial networks: Kinship distance and dwelling unit proximity in rural Thailand

We address a long hypothesized relationship between the proximity of individuals’ dwelling units and their kinship association. Better understanding this relationship is important because of its implications for contact and association among members of a society. In this paper, we use a unique dataset from Nang Rong, Thailand which contains dwelling unit locations (GPS) and saturated kinship networks of all individuals living in 51 agricultural villages. After presenting arguments for a relationship between individuals’ dwelling unit locations and their kinship relations as well as the particulars of our case study, we introduce the data and describe our analytic approach. We analyze how kinship – considered as both a system linking collections of individuals in an extended kinship network and as dyadic links between pairs of individuals – patterns the proximity of dwelling units in rural villages. The results show that in general, extended kin live closer to one another than do unrelated individuals. Further, the degree of relatedness between kin correlates with the distance between their dwelling units. Close kin are more likely to co-reside, a fact which drives much of the relationship between kinship relatedness and dwelling unit proximity within villages. There is nevertheless suggestive evidence of a relationship between kinship association and dwelling unit proximity among kin who do not live together.