Child care availability and first-birth timing in Norway

Both sociological and economic theories posit that widely available, high-quality, and affordable child care should have pronatalist effects. Yet to date, the empirical evidence has not consistently supported this hypothesis. We argue that this previous empirical work has been plagued by the inability to control for endogenous placement of day care centers and the possibility that people migrate to take advantage of the availability of child care facilities. Using Norwegian register data and a statistically defensible fixed-effects model, we find strong positive effects of day care availability on the transition to motherhood.     

Social class and workers’ rent, 1983–2001

Sociologists and economists continue to seek explanations for the growth of earnings inequality since the late 1970s. In this article, we draw upon the structural tradition of labor market analysis in sociology in order evaluate the conjecture that selective rent destruction is a source of the recent increase in earnings inequality. In empirical analysis of the Outgoing Rotation Groups of the Current Population Surveys from 1983 to 2001, we demonstrate that (1) the earnings of workers at the bottom of the class distribution have declined relative to the earnings of those at the top and (2) the variance of wage premia associated with employment in alternative industries has declined relatively more for those at the bottom of the class distribution. Adopting the position from both the sociology and labor economics literatures that these industry wage premia are reasonable measures of industry rents, we conclude that the results support the rent destruction conjecture and, by implication, that structural models of labor markets can explain some of the increase in earnings inequality.     

A DIAGNOSTIC ROUTINE FOR THE DETECTION OF CONSEQUENTIAL HETEROGENEITY OF CAUSAL EFFECTS

Least squares regression estimates of causal effects are conditional-variance-weighted estimates of individual-level causal effects. In this paper, we extract from the literature on counterfactual causality a simple nine-step routine to determine whether or not the implicit weighting of regression has generated a misleading estimate of the average causal effect. The diagnostic routine is presented along with a detailed and original demonstration, using data from the 2002 and 2004 waves of the Education Longitudinal Study, for a contested but important causal effect in educational research: the effect of Catholic schooling, in comparison to public schooling, on the achievement of high school students in the United States.     

RUNAWAYS: JURISDICTION, DYNAMICS, AND TREATMENT

New research indicates more clearly than ever that running away from home is indeed a family affair. Understood as such, the implications for society's jurisdictional response and for effective treatment planning are deep and far-reaching. The "status offender" legal jurisdiction over runaways needs to be changed and new alternatives for dealing with runaways and their families developed. The planning and implementation of these alternatives need to be informed with the perspectives of a family therapeutic approach sensitive to the intergenerational forces of loyalty, legacy, and trust operating within families.     

Recent Trends in the Timing of First Births in the United States

We use vital registration data published since 1979 to update trends in the timing of first births. Two important trends are documented. First, the likelihood that childless women over age 30 will have a first birth has increased since the 1970s. This change shows that women born in the 1950s are "catching up" on fertility postponed at younger ages. Second, racial differences in the timing of first births are very large. For those born in the 1950s, nonwhites have first births much earlier, and far fewer nonwhite than white women will remain permanently childless. In the second part of the paper, we use these data for recent years to assess earlier projections of childlessness based on cohort and period approaches. We also assess the accuracy of stated intentions to have no children.