Young Mothers’ Experiences of Receiving the Baby Bonus: A Qualitative Study

The year 2014 marked the abolition of the Baby Bonus and its replacement with a substantially reduced parenting payment. While often criticised as “middle-class welfare,” or publicly denounced due to its purported misuse by disadvantaged mothers, this paper argues that the Baby Bonus provided valuable financial assistance to families experiencing high financial stress. To investigate young women's experience of receiving the Baby Bonus, 19 semistructured interviews were conducted with young mothers in Melbourne who had recently had babies. Many were experiencing financial stress and this payment provided much needed financial support for the basic costs arising from having a baby. Several mothers perceived work as a luxury that was out of reach due to high childcare costs relative to their earning capacity and therefore saw Paid Parental Leave as a further privilege unavailable to them. Our results suggest that while the concerns of policymakers to achieve the best use of scarce resources are critical, it should also be acknowledged that the policy change may have serious implications for many young mothers and may exacerbate disadvantage, and young mothers’ sense of alienation, ultimately leading to greater inequalities.     

Destroyed by Slavery? Slavery and African American Family Formation Following Emancipation

This study introduces a new sample that links people and families across 1860, 1880, and 1900 census data to explore the intergenerational impact of slavery on black families in the United States. Slaveholding—the number of slaves owned by a single farmer or planter—is used as a proxy for experiences during slavery. Slave family structures varied systematically with slaveholding sizes. Enslaved children on smaller holdings were more likely to be members of single-parent or divided families. On larger holdings, however, children tended to reside in nuclear families. In 1880, a child whose mother had been on a farm with five slaves was 49 % more likely to live in a single-parent household than a child whose mother had been on a farm with 15 slaves. By 1900, slaveholding no longer had an impact. However, children whose parents lived in single-parent households were themselves more likely to live in single-parent households and to have been born outside marriage.     

Cohort Differences in Parental Financial Help to Adult Children

In this article, we examine birth cohort differences in parents’ provision of monetary help to adult children with particular focus on the extent to which cohort differences in family structure and the transition to adulthood influence these changes. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study from 1994 to 2010, we compare financial help to children of three respondent cohorts as the parents in these birth cohorts from ages 53–58 to 57–62. We find that transfers to children have increased among more recent cohorts. Two trends—declining family size and children’s delay in marriage—account for part of the increase across cohorts. However, other trends, such as the increase in the number of stepchildren and increasing child’s income level, tend to decrease the observed cohort trend.     

Stochastic Forecasting of Labor Supply and Population: An Integrated Model

This paper presents a stochastic model to forecast the German population and labor supply until 2060. Within a cohort-component approach, our population forecast applies principal components analysis to birth, mortality, emigration, and immigration rates, which allows for the reduction of dimensionality and accounts for correlation of the rates. Labor force participation rates are estimated by means of an econometric time series approach. All time series are forecast by stochastic simulation using the bootstrap method. As our model also distinguishes between German and foreign nationals, different developments in fertility, migration, and labor participation could be predicted. The results show that even rising birth rates and high levels of immigration cannot break the basic demographic trend in the long run. An important finding from an endogenous modeling of emigration rates is that high net migration in the long run will be difficult to achieve. Our stochastic perspective suggests therefore a high probability of substantially decreasing the labor supply in Germany.     

Fifty Years After the Social Indicators Movement: Has the Promise Been Fulfilled?

In spite of its currency both in academic research and political rhetoric, there are numerous attempts to define and conceptualize the social cohesion concept but there has been paid little attention to provide a rigorous and empirically tested definition. There are even fewer studies that address social cohesion in a framework of cross-cultural validation of the indicators testing the equivalence of the factorial structure across countries. Finally, as far as we know there is no study that attempt to provide an empirically tested multilevel definition of social cohesion specifying a Multilevel Structural Equation Model. This study aims to cover this gap. First, we provide a theoretical construct of social cohesion taking into account not only its multidimensionality but also its multilevel structure. In the second step, to test the validity of this theoretical construct, we perform a multilevel confirmatory factor analysis in order to verify if the conceptual structure suggested in first step holds. In addition, we test the cross-level structural equivalence and the measurement invariance of the model in order to verify if the same multilevel model of social cohesion holds across the 29 countries analysed. In the final step, we specify a second-order multilevel CFA model in order to identify the existence of a general factor that can be called “social cohesion” operating in society that accounts for the surface phenomena that we observe.     

Corruption and the ‘Paradox of Redistribution’

The existing literature on the determinants of income redistribution has identified a ‘paradox’. Namely, that countries with a high degree of market income inequality redistribute little, which is in disagreement with the median voter theorem. In a first step, this paper outlines several mechanisms that explain why government corruption might be partially responsible for this ‘paradox’. In a second step, different corruption perception indices and an instrumental variable approach are used to provide empirical evidence that indicates a significant negative impact of corruption on redistribution levels for a sample of 148 developing and developed countries. This finding suggests that, next to political and need factors, government corruption explains to some extent the ‘paradox of redistribution’. This is especially true for many developing countries, given that they typically have relatively high degrees of corruption and low levels of redistribution.     

Do significant labor market events change who does the chores? Paid work,housework, and power in mixed-gender Australian households

We examine how men and women in mixed-gender unions change the time they allocate to housework in response to labor market promotions and terminations. Operating much like raises, such events have the potential to alter intra-household power dynamics. Using Australian panel data, we estimate couple-specific fixed effects models and find that female promotion has the strongest association with housework time allocation adjustments. These adjustments are in part attributable to concurrent changes in paid work time, but gender power relations also appear to play a role. Further results indicate that households holding more liberal gender role attitudes are more likely to adjust their housework time allocations after female promotion events. Power dynamics cannot, however, explain all the results. Supporting the sociological theory that partners may “do gender,” we find that in households with more traditional gender role attitudes, his housework time falls while hers rises when he is terminated.