Costs and Rewards of Children: The Effects of Becoming a Parent on Adults' Lives

How do new parents differ from their childless counterparts in social and psychological resources, daily strains, and psychological well‐being? Using a nationally representative panel of 1,933 adults who were childless at the first interview, we compare 6 indicators of adults' lives for those who became parents and those remaining childless several years later, controlling for earlier states. Becoming a parent is both detrimental and rewarding. With the exception of social integration, which is greater for all groups of new parents compared with their childless counterparts, the effects of parental status on adults' lives vary markedly by gender and marital status. Unmarried parents report lower self‐efficacy and higher depression than their childless counterparts. Married mothers' lives are marked by more housework and more marital conflict but less depression than their childless counterparts. Parental status has little influence on the lives of married men.     

Valuation of childhood risk reduction: the importance of age, risk preferences, and perspective.

This article explores two problems analysts face in determining how to estimate values for children's health and safety risk reductions. The first addresses the question: Do willingness‐to‐pay estimates for health risk changes differ across children and adults and, if so, how? To answer this question, the article first examines the potential effects of age and risk preferences on willingness to pay. A summary of the literature reporting empirical evidence of differences between willingness to pay for adult health and safety risk reductions and willingness to pay for health and safety risk reductions in children is also provided. The second dimension of the problem is a more fundamental issue: Whose perspective is relevant when valuing children's health effects—society's, children's, adults‐as‐children, or parents'? Each perspective is considered, followed ultimately by the conclusion that adopting a parental perspective through an intrahousehold allocation model seems closest to meeting the needs of the estimation problem at hand. A policy example in which the choice of perspective affects the outcome of a regulatory benefit‐cost analysis rounds out the article and emphasizes the importance of perspective.     

股票股利变化市场反应的实证研究

对公司分配方案中股票股利发生变化时股票收益率的研究,显示证券市场对股票股利分配方案发生变化时有一定反应,但与国外成熟资本市场的反应并不一致,说明我国证券市场距离国外成熟资本市场还有一定差距,证券市场信息披露制度尚不规范。     

中国股票市场效率的实证研究

处于二元转型期的中国股票市场,功能定位不完全合理,结构性矛盾突出。行政导向性强,是一个不完全市场。市 场仍处于非弱效率状态。利用1999-2000年中国股票市场的时间序列数据进行的自相关系数检验和游程检验.证实了中国 股票市场非弱有效性的判断。     

关于改进我国天然气管输定价方式的探讨

探索了我国现行天然气管输运价形成机制严重背离天然气市场发育的弊端，进而提出与国际接轨的建议，即通过分别确定管输企业年度应收服务费和按两部制设计用户运价率来制定管输价格。     

信息不对称与中小企业信贷支持——兼析中小企业信贷市场中的政府作用

通过建立一个银行对中小企业信贷的博弈模型 ,说明当市场上低风险企业过少 ,高风险企业过多时 ,银行不能通过贷款收益收回自己的风险类型鉴别成本。在不可能提高投资项目自有资本比例 ,而利率放开有待时日 ,极易加剧道德风险的情况下 ,银行无法改善其收益小于成本的处境。因此 ,从中小企业信贷市场退出是银行的最优选择。最终指出 ,为了促进中小企业的发展 ,建立一个由国家提供部分担保、商业性银行发放贷款的中小企业信贷体系对支持中小企业发展、健全完善的金融体系是可能的 ,也是必要的。     

The Experience of Gender Change in Public Sector Organizations

The state has a twofold relationship to gender change in society, through its overall steering capacity and through the gendered character of its constituent agencies. It is therefore important to understand the experience of gender change in state organizations. The findings from a study of gender relations in ten public‐sector worksites in New South Wales, Australia are presented. There is a widespread consciousness of gender change linked with new labour processes, restructuring and new patterns of management. These changes are uneven and limits to change are visible. Gender is recognized as an organizational problem in specific circumstances, most visibly where men’s resistance to change appears. A number of mechanisms limit the consciousness of gender as a problem. Several trends, including the current strength of neo‐liberalism, converge to make the gender‐neutral workplace the principal goal of gender reform in the public‐sector workplace. This, however, limits the state’s steering capacity in regard to societal gender relations.     

Collapsing the Boundaries? Fatherhood,Organization and Home‐Working

In the modern western world, the discursive construction of fatherhood and everyday fathering practices has been underpinned by the spatial separation of work from home, of public from private. However, increasing numbers of employees are now working from home and a disproportionate number of these are men with young children. This article draws on new empirical research to examine the implications for fathers and for organizations as home‐working disrupts earlier spatial configurations of fatherhood and fathering practices. The article concludes that as the spatial boundaries between home and work collapse, new accommodations between fatherhood/fathering and organization are emerging. However, these are underpinned by a traditional gender division of labour in the household. More broadly, these findings confirm the inadequacy of static distinctions between public and private, showing that while such distinctions are still used to mark space and time, this is relational, contingent and unstable.     

Threshold decisions: how social workers prioritize referrals of child concern

This paper examines local authority social workers' decision‐making when considering referrals of children, where the concerns are on the margin of child protection procedures. In doing so, it describes the findings of a qualitative research study undertaken in the policy context of attempts to ‘refocus’ social work practice in the late 1990s and early twenty‐first century. Data collection involved interviews with social workers and parents in 23 cases. Conclusions are that referrals were evaluated on the basis of five key factors, specificity, severity, risk, parental accountability and corroboration, the use of which determined whether an initial assessment or an investigation of alleged abuse took place. The analysis builds on previous work in the child protection field, but demonstrates how the application of these factors differs between cases of child concern and cases of child protection. Policy implications concern the complexity of decision‐making in the uncertain context of limited referral information and it is proposed that the simplistic notion of a continuum of abuse is now outdated. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Child‐Care Usage and Mother‐Infant “Quality Time”

Mothers' time‐use patterns were compared in families in which infants spent more than 30 hours per week in child care (In‐Care group; n= 143) versus 0 hours per week (At‐Home group; n= 183) from birth to 6 months of age. In‐Care group mothers spent about 12 fewer hours per week interacting with their infants, for about 32% less time; fathers of these infants were more involved in caregiving. The groups did not differ in the quality of mother‐infant interaction. In the In‐Care group, quantity of interaction was related to greater separation anxiety and concerns about effects of maternal employment. Time‐use data were not related to child outcomes at 15 months of age. Results suggest that the effect of extensive time spent apart on the quantity and quality of mother‐infant interaction may be smaller than anticipated.