Journal of Family and Economic Issues最新文献

Communicating about finances is essential to develop shared meaning and goals within couple relationships. When couples struggle to discuss finances, they can experience poor couple outcomes. For researchers and clinicians to effectively study and promote healthy couple communication patterns regarding finances, a parsimonious, reliable, and valid measure of couples’ financial communication is needed. This study examined the psychometric utility of the 5-item Couples’ Financial Communication Scale (originally developed for the Flourishing Families Project; Day, R. D., Bean, R., Coyne, S., Dyer, J., Harper, J., & Walker, L. (2017). Flourishing families project: Survey of family life [codebook].) using two large, diverse samples—one of emerging adult individuals in a romantic relationship (N = 1,950) and another of dyads in a romantic relationship (N = 1,252; 69.9% beyond emerging adulthood). Similar findings emerged across both samples. Inter-item correlations, skewness, and kurtosis of the five items were within acceptable ranges. The five items loaded onto a latent construct with robust standardized factor loadings (ranging from 0.63 to 0.90) and sound model fit. Cronbach’s alpha revealed sound reliability (α = between 0.85 and 0.89). Multiple tests of measurement equivalence suggest the measure appears to be reasonably useful across theoretically meaningful groups (gender, age, income, marital status, and joint banking behaviors). Couples’ financial communication and couples’ relationship quality were positively correlated with large effect sizes—showing initial evidence of predictive validity. The parsimonious Couples’ Financial Communication Scale has sound evidence of reliability, validity, and measurement equivalence across two diverse samples, which positions it to be a useful measure in future scholarship to assess the degree to which couples engage in ongoing healthy and cooperative financial communication.

Families headed by single mothers face economic vulnerability, and many rely on multiple public benefit programs. This study explored multiple benefits program participation and its relationship with material hardship among low-income single-mother families in the United States. Using nationally representative data, we employed cluster analysis to explore patterns of multiple program participation in 10 benefits programs and used logistic regression to examine the relationships between program participation clusters and material hardship. Four program participation groups emerged: Many Benefits, Moderate Benefits, Only School Meal, and No Benefits. Material hardships (i.e., food hardship, medical hardship, unmet basic needs, housing hardship) were prevalent across all clusters. However, the Many Benefits group, which received the highest number of benefits, exhibited the highest rate of both food hardship (43.17%) and unmet basic needs (51.09%). Despite receiving more support than other groups, this group was more likely than the other groups to experience these hardships (except for medical hardship) that public benefits are designed to alleviate. This finding underscores the limitations of current social benefits and calls for policy revisions that enhance the amount, duration, and accessibility of public benefits to promote the well-being of the United States’ most vulnerable families.

This article evaluates the conceptual replication of a text and audio Behavioral Change Communication Program (Crianza Positiva) on parenting practices and well-being in households with children aged 0–2 years in Uruguay during the COVID-19 pandemic. The intervention uses behavioral economics tools to reorient parents’ attention towards positive parenting practices. Using an experimental design involving 39 early childhood centers (687 families), we find no effects of the intervention on the outcomes of interest. This finding contrasts with those found in a previous edition of the program in 2018, which showed improvements in parental involvement, in the quality of parent–child interaction, and in adult–child language patterns (Balsa in Child & Youth Care Forum 53:1–22, 2023a; Balsa in Behavioural Public Policy 7: 607–643, 2023c; Bloomfield in Review of the Economics of the Household 21:95–130, 2023). We consider various hypotheses behind the lack of results, which in turn point to key issues to consider when designing similar programs. First, these messaging programs may work as a complement to more intensive interventions, but may have limited impact when implemented in isolation. Unlike the 2018 messages, which were sent after an 8-session face-to-face workshop, the new edition was implemented without a previous workshop. Second, the problems introduced by the pandemic increased families’ stress, time and space constraints, potentially reducing family’s receptivity to the messages. Indeed, we find suggestive evidence that the messages increased parental stress or depressive symptoms in adults facing household overcrowding. In addition, early childhood centers actively used WhatsApp messages to stay in touch with families during the pandemic, competing for the attention of the families. Finally, the 2020 sample had a higher prevalence of more educated mothers, who may be less responsive to these types of interventions.

We analyze the effects of family size on food consumption. Specifically, we explore the economies of scale that emerge in families, taking advantage of a very rich panel data for Spanish consumers. We hypothesize that family public goods induce economies of scale in consumption and, consequently, larger families should have higher per capita consumption of private goods, such as food. To that end, we estimate the Quadratic Almost Ideal Demand System to derive own-price and income elasticities, which allows us to test the economies of scale conditions on food consumption. Our results show that the positive relationship between per capita food expenditure and family size holds in only 585 observations, with these families being characterized as having per capita income in the two highest centiles of the distribution. Our results should be interpreted in the context of the particular economic crises of the 1970s and 1980s, as a consequence of the economic shocks due to very high oil prices that affected Spain.

According to economic theory, the rise in women’s social status leads to an increase in their bargaining power within the household and simultaneously reduces their burden of housework. However, some studies report that when the wife’s relative income exceeds a certain level, her burden of housework increases instead. In this study, we determine whether wife’s relative income affects household chores linearly, and examine the relationship between wife’s relative income, gender norms, and housework from a bargaining perspective. We use Japanese panel data on attitudes toward traditional gender norms, couples’ income, and housework. The results show a linear relationship between the division of housework and wife’s relative income within Japanese households. However, this linear relationship is heterogeneous due to gender norms. Specifically, we find that gender norms do not impact the division of housework directly. Instead, there is an indirect weakening of the impact of wife’s relative income on the division of housework. This implies that regardless of household norms, an increase in wife’s relative income leads to a more equitable housework allocation, even though the effect is smaller for households with traditional norms. These results suggest that narrowing the wage gap between men and women in Japan may lead to a more equal division of housework.

This study investigates how long higher cash assistance eligibility from the tax system was associated with the financial hardship experienced by lower-income households during the COVID-19 pandemic. I use data from the United States Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, which has regularly gathered data on financial hardship since August 2020. I utilize four contexts created by across-time and across-group variations in cash assistance eligibility for lower-income households with and without children (higher- and lower-eligible groups, respectively). In general, findings of models estimated using a difference-in-differences event study approach suggest that higher cash assistance eligibility was linked to a reduction in financial hardship in some of the weeks after the beginning of the payments; however, the association faded out after a while before reappearing following the beginning of subsequent payments. Although this study cannot identify program-specific effects, results suggest that pandemic-era programs—such as Economic Impact Payments and Advance Child Tax Credit—played a role, along with existing lump-sum Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit programs, in reducing financial hardship over an extended period in 2021. These findings have implications for designing cash assistance programs and measuring financial hardship experienced by economically disadvantaged households.

The financial situation of Brazilians is a frequent topic of research due to the country’s financial instability. However, there are few instruments available to measure financial constructs in Brazil. Therefore, this study aims to conduct the cross-cultural adaptation and validation of The Multidimensional Subjective Financial Well-being Scale (MSFWBS) for Brazilian adults. To ensure the conceptual adaptation and language clarity of instrument items, experts (n = 5) and target population (n = 15) were invited to rate (quantitative data) and comment (qualitative data) on instrument adequacy. After the cross-cultural adaptation, multiple psychometric properties (reliability evidence, factorial, convergent and external validity) of the Brazilian MSFWBS version were assessed among 529 Brazilian adults. Through an exploratory factor analysis done by the extraction method of minimum rank factor analysis, we found the same 5-factor multidimensional structure proposed in the MSFWBS original version. The items showed adequate factor loadings and the retained factors explained 66.3% of the shared item’s variance, with reliability evidence range from ω = 0.83 to .94 among the factors. We also found convergent (with well-being and psychopathological symptoms) and external (with occupational status) validity of MSFWBS scores. Therefore, our results demonstrated that the instrument is adequate to measure Brazilian adults’ subjective financial well-being. This study contributes to the advancement of the research on financial well-being by providing a new measurement for Brazilian adults.

The economic circumstances in which children grow up have garnered much scholarly attention due to their close associations with well-being over the life course. While it has been well-documented that children are increasingly growing up in households where their primary financial support comes from their mother, regardless of whether she is partnered or single, the consequences for household economic well-being are unclear. We use the 2014 Survey of Income and Program Participation to quantify how a mother's transition into primary earner status affects the economic well-being of her household and if the effects differ based on her relationship status. On average, household income declines and more households are unable to meet their economic needs once the mother becomes the primary earner. However, these declines in income are concentrated among partnered-mother households and mothers who transition from partnered to single during the year. At the same time, although many single mothers see an increase in household income, the majority of these households are still unable to meet their economic needs. These findings suggest that the shift to a welfare system that requires employment coupled with structural changes in the labor market have created financial hardship for most families.

The private economic assistance that women experiencing poverty can potentially receive during a marital separation has been largely overlooked. This study investigates determinants of economic aid from family, friends, and private community organizations among women experiencing marital separation and poverty. Such private social help may make the difference between an informal but flexible support network and a formal but routine social safety net. Using panel data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), this study found that the odds of a woman receiving private help to make ends meet during a period of marital separation and poverty were associated with her human capital, command over marital assets, employment, and duration of the separation. Separated women with fewer economic resources or more urgent economic needs were more likely to receive informal social help. The growing dependency on private assistance over the duration of marital separation also suggests the chronic strain model that economic hardship is a chronic stress for women after separation.

This study investigated effective methods for reducing food waste. We designed an experiment to present four types of treatments aimed at reducing food waste and estimated potential effects. We suggested a relevant policy to control food waste in restaurants by discouraging consumers from ordering more food than required. A total of 1,000 consumers participated in the experimental surveys in South Korea; they were divided into groups of 200 each for one control group and four treatment groups: education, nudge, incentive for fewer side dishes, and penalty for more side dishes. Statistical analysis revealed that while education was effective in preventing consumers from choosing more side dishes than necessary, nudges were initially ineffective, but could be cost-effective with careful design. The results indicated that both the incentive and penalty interventions effectively prevented consumers from choosing more side dishes, with partial evidence that penalty is more effective only when individuals have the option to choose all side dishes or none.