Decomposing the increase in men’s time on childcare during the great recession

In this paper, I examine the time men spent on childcare during the recession of 2007–2009. The recession provides a sudden change in the employment opportunities of men relative to women in the United States. Using the American Time Use Survey and the linked Current Population Survey, I show that this lopsided shock to employment opportunities was accompanied by an increase in the average amount of time men spent on childcare. In particular, men’s average time on physical care for children increased during the recession; this is an element of childcare that men perform less than women. I decompose the total change in average time on childcare into behavioral, compositional, and between group change. A behavioral change among employed men accounted for the majority of the total increase in the average time spent on childcare; among men who are out of the labor force, the increase is entirely due to compositional changes.     

Social-ecological innovation: adaptive responses to urban environmental conditions

Novel approaches to natural resource management, particularly those which promote stakeholder participation, have been put forward as fundamental ingredients for establishing resilient, polycentric forms of environmental governance. This is nowhere more pertinent than in the case of the complex adaptive systems associated with urban areas. Decentralisation of urban green space management has been posited as an element thereof which, according to resilience thinking, should contribute to the adaptive capacity of cities and the ecosystem services upon which they rely. Implicit in this move towards increased adaptive capacity is the ability to manage through innovation. Although the importance of innovation towards system adaptability has been acknowledged, little work has thus far been carried out which demonstrates that innovative use of urban green space represents a form of adaptive response to environmental conditions. The current paper reports on research which maps examples of organised social-ecological innovation (OSEI) in an urban study area and evaluates them as adaptive responses to local environmental conditions which may contribute to system resilience. The results present OSEI as a coherent body of responses to local social and environmental deprivation, exhibiting diversity and adaptability according to individual contexts. The study therefore provides evidence for the importance of local stakeholder-led innovation as in the building of adaptive capacity in urban social-ecological systems.     

Multi-neighborhood based iterated tabu search for routing and wavelength assignment problem

The routing and wavelength assignment problem (RWA) has shown to be NP-hard if the wavelength continuity constraint and the objective of minimizing the number of wavelengths are considered. This paper introduces a multi-neighborhood based iterated tabu search algorithm (MN-ITS), which consists of three neighborhoods with a unified incremental evaluation method, to solve the min-RWA problem. The proposed MN-ITS algorithm is tested on a set of widely studied real world instances as well as a set of challenging random ones in the literature. Comparison with other reference algorithms shows that the MN-ITS algorithm is able to improve five best upper bounds obtained by other competitive reference algorithms in the literature. This paper also presents an analysis to show the significance of the unified incremental evaluation technique and the combination of multiple neighborhoods.     

Obesity and sex ratios in the U.S.

This paper studies how rising male incarceration and its impact on marriage markets has affected female incentives to gain weight. Exogenous variation in marriage market conditions is obtained from differential trends in male incarceration rates across markets defined by race, location and age. We provide evidence that marriage market conditions do in fact affect the incidence of obesity. In particular, we find that increases in male imprisonment that reduced the male–female sex-ratio explain about 18 % of the increase in the female obesity rate for African-Americans in the United States over the 1990s. Results are particularly large for those in the younger age group (ages 18–23).     

Use It or Save It? Migration Background and Parental Leave Uptake in Sweden

Sweden is a welfare state with a family policy that strongly emphasizes equality without distinction by place of birth or gender. In this study, we investigate the differences in uptake of parental leave between native and immigrant mothers, and the connection to labour-market attachment. Sweden represents a unique case study, not only because of the strong effort to combine work and family for all women and men, the high level of fertility and the large presence of immigrants in the country; it also enables a detailed and sophisticated analysis based on the high-quality data derived from its population registers. We find that immigrant mothers use more parental leave benefit the first year after their child’s birth, but then fewer in the second year compared with native mothers. The differences diminish when labour-market activity is controlled for. Additionally, after a time in Sweden, immigrant mothers use leave more similarly to how native mothers do.     

Models of the Joint Structure of Domain-Related and Global Distress: Implications for the Reconciliation of Quality of Life and Mental Health Perspectives

Research on subjective wellbeing includes studies of both domain-related and global distress. The mental health literature, though, focuses almost exclusively on global distress. This seems to be partly due to a common belief that psychological distress, and the moods that comprise distress, necessarily lack referential content. However, if that were the case it would make little sense for any study to ever focus on domain-related distress. The research presented in this report clarifies the relation between global and domain-related distress. We compare confirmatory factor analytic models of the joint relationship among symptoms of global distress with affective symptoms of distress about work, home, and physical appearance. Data are from a general population telephone survey. In the best-fitting models domain-related distress and global psychological distress are related but distinct latent variables. We discuss the theoretical and methodological implications of the models, and model choice.     

« Comment ? Vous n’avez pas de projet ? » : ethnographie du démarchage en matière de crédit à la consommation

Many a product and service is proposed to consumers who have not individually expressed any prior interest to a salesperson or a firm. Two situations of prospecting people for a revolving credit are presented. Based on data gathered during a month of observation in the company of salespersons who deal in this type of credit, the processes are analyzed that these persons use to arouse a potential buyer's interest. Light is shed on the organizational, material and technical conditions that enable them to turn the latter into a customer or, at least, to make interactions with him/her last longer. This analysis of one form of mediation in the marketing of credit also sheds light on the situations of those who subscribe to loans, whether or not they are over indebted.     

Sequential Monte Carlo for rare event estimation

This paper discusses a novel strategy for simulating rare events and an associated Monte Carlo estimation of tail probabilities. Our method uses a system of interacting particles and exploits a Feynman-Kac representation of that system to analyze their fluctuations. Our precise analysis of the variance of a standard multilevel splitting algorithm reveals an opportunity for improvement. This leads to a novel method that relies on adaptive levels and produces, in the limit of an idealized version of the algorithm, estimates with optimal variance. The motivation for this theoretical work comes from problems occurring in watermarking and fingerprinting of digital contents, which represents a new field of applications of rare event simulation techniques. Some numerical results show performance close to the idealized version of our technique for these practical applications.     

Incarceration and Household Asset Ownership

A considerable literature documents the deleterious economic consequences of incarceration. However, little is known about the consequences of incarceration for household assets—a distinct indicator of economic well-being that may be especially valuable to the survival of low-income families—or about the spillover economic consequences of incarceration for families. In this article, we use longitudinal data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to examine how incarceration is associated with asset ownership among formerly incarcerated men and their romantic partners. Results, which pay careful attention to the social forces that select individuals into incarceration, show that incarceration is negatively associated with ownership of a bank account, vehicle, and home among men and that these consequences for asset ownership extend to the romantic partners of these men. These associations are concentrated among men who previously held assets. Results also show that post-incarceration changes in romantic relationships are an important pathway by which even short-term incarceration depletes assets.     

What Influences the Location of Nonprofit Organizations? A Spatial Analysis in Brazil

What are the local characteristics influencing where new nonprofits will be established? How important are community needs, available resources, or the existence of similar organizations for nonprofits’ location? This paper analyzes how the characteristics of 5562 Brazilian municipalities in the year 2000 help explain the location of nonprofits formed between 2001 and 2010. Based on geographically weighted regressions, results indicate that neither access to resources nor poor socioeconomic indicators are powerful influences on nonprofit location in Brazilian municipalities. The main predictor of nonprofit entry is a high pre-existing density of nonprofits in that area. These findings, however, vary across regions and nonprofit fields of activity. By mapping the effect of key explanatory variables, this paper helps understand nonprofit location. The methodology and findings on nonprofit location presented here are novel and may contribute to research in other countries.