Journal of Family and Economic Issues最新文献

In India, social prejudices against women are culturally entrenched, and women carry an unfair and disproportionate burden of unpaid work, often reduced to “unproductive labor”. Nuclear families are rapidly replacing multigenerational families, which could have a significant impact on women’s mobility and capacity to strike a balance between work and family life.

This article explores the time use pattern of working-age women in unpaid domestic work in multigenerational and multi-compositional households, shedding light on the intricate dynamics of household responsibilities and the potential implications on gender equality. This study uses data from the Time Use Survey (2019) of India, conducted by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) from January – December 2019. Our study considers working-age women between 15 and 64 years and the sample size is 174,621. A negative binomial regression approach is used to explain the effect of explanatory factors on women’s time spent on unpaid domestic work and its family dynamics. Our findings reveal a significant gender disparity in unpaid work persisting across the lifespan. Specifically, married women bear a disproportionate burden of unpaid work compared to their unmarried counterparts. Higher education reduces the time spent by a working-age woman on unpaid domestic work. We find that women exhibit the most paradoxical traits, and the complex Indian social stratification contributes to a huge disparity in unpaid domestic work, with upper-caste Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh women putting in the most hours.

The presence of school-age children increases the amount of time women spend on unpaid domestic work. Women living in a nuclear family, on average, have higher levels of unpaid work compared to women living in multigenerational households. Unpaid domestic work of women reduces in female predominant households while increases in male predominant households. While natal parents are more supportive than in-laws, the education of parents and in-laws has a significant impact on unpaid domestic work. Our study has policy implications and discusses the conflicts working-age women could encounter between family and economic work.

Gary Becker founded two workshops: the Labor Workshop at Columbia University in 1958 and the Applications of Economics Workshop at Chicago in 1970. At Columbia, Becker ran the Labor Workshop for more than a decade; Jacob Mincer co-directed it for about half of that time and then became its principal director. The workshops fostered novel applications of economics to areas like household economics, labor economics and economics of human capital. These workshops had a relatively high proportion of women participating in them. We find that in the years 1960–1980, when Becker and Mincer published pioneering research in household economics, the odds that a PhD in Economics was obtained by a woman were 5.6 times higher among those who had participated in any Becker-founded workshop than among those who had participated in another workshop at Columbia or Chicago. The odds that a graduate was a woman were higher for Columbia than for Chicago and were highest for the Columbia workshop after Becker left for Chicago and Mincer became its principal director. These findings are consistent with women at that time showing a relatively strong interest in household economics combined with the novelty and innovation of the work, the topics covered and the approach taken in the Becker-founded workshops.

Children’s post-separation living arrangements may have important implications for mothers’ economic wellbeing. This study examines self-reported economic wellbeing of mothers with shared versus sole physical custody (also known as shared care) of the child six or more years since separation, using unique survey data on separated parents in Finland (n = 850) and Wisconsin, US (n = 395) in 2019–2020. We use sequential logistic regression models to examine the pathways through which this association potentially occurs—child support and sharing of children’s expenses between parents—and whether the outcomes differ by the family policy contexts of Finland and Wisconsin. Our findings suggest that Wisconsin mothers in shared versus sole physical custody arrangements have significantly lower levels of economic hardship, that are fully explained by greater cost-sharing with the other parent of the child. No such relationship is evident in Finland, although cost-sharing is independently negatively associated with economic hardship of Finnish mothers. Findings highlight how fathers’ contributions as tied to children’s living arrangements matter for post-separation economic wellbeing of mothers, and have implications for shared physical custody and child support policy.

This conversation between Terri Friedline and Matt Remle took place in November 2022. The conversation occurred as private banks were increasing their investments in fossil fuels and organizers were calling to establish new, publicly accountable financial institutions that would not underwrite climate devastation. As a Hunkpapa Lakota man and member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, Matt has actively participated in and led fossil fuel divestment and public banking campaigns. He has also protested militarism, wars, economic sanctions, and toxic waste sites. In addition to recognizing many people’s long-held appreciation for Matt’s perspectives, my intentions in having this conversation were to move the study of financial well-being markedly beyond its common individualized focus and to consider the ways that systems of oppression and domination shape families’ financial lives. Along these lines, we talked about settler colonialism, fossil fuel divestment, and public banking advocacy. Our conversation concludes with a call to build authentic relationships, with humility and genuineness, as a path toward truly dismantling settler colonialism.

Based on data from the Global University Entrepreneurial Students’ Spirit Survey (GUESS) 2018 project, this study examined the relationship between parental support factors and next-generation members’ succession intention and investigated the mediating effect of next-generation members’ commitment to the family firm. The results of the structural equation modeling analysis showed a mediating effect of next-generation members’ commitment to the family firm on the relationship between parental support and next-generation members’ succession intention. Specifically, normative commitment negatively mediated the relationship of succession intentions with parental career-related modeling and verbal encouragement. We employed social exchange theory to examine why these relationships occur. The findings of this study extend our knowledge of the parental support factors that potentially increase next-generation members’ commitment and succession intention.

This paper studies the dynamics of financial responsibility division within mixed-gender couples. Analysis is based on individuals’ self-assessments of their own contribution to four household activities collected in the Survey of Consumer Payment Choice. A series of logistic regressions link reported roles from 3728 households to respondent gender and six household characteristics, representing aggregate and relative attributes with respect to age, education, and income. A second, longitudinally-based analysis relates reported contribution levels in subsequent survey years to changes in household income dynamics. For bill payments, the data are consistent with a bargaining model in which relative income rankings, more so than other household variables, relate to responsibility shares. For decisions about saving and investments and decisions on other financial matters, in addition to income rank, there is also some evidence that greater relative educational attainment coincides with greater responsibility shares. For household shopping, however, tendencies in household role assignment seem predominantly driven by gender considerations. Females across all household types consistently do more of the shopping, and females are much more likely to increase their contribution, even when they become the primary earner.

Gender differences in the economic consequences of divorce are well established and reveal how a traditional gender-based division of paid and unpaid labor can render women economically vulnerable when marriages dissolve. Guided by intersectional approaches that recognize systemic racism and entrenched gender inequality, we assess how race/ethnicity and gender intersect to pattern the economic consequences of divorce. Drawing on 28 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79), we conduct a descriptive analysis of the short-term economic impact of marital disruption for non-Hispanic Black women and men, Hispanic women and men, and non-Hispanic White women and men. Our bivariate and multivariable results indicate that the economic consequences of marital disruption vary substantially on the basis of race/ethnicity and gender. All groups of women fare worse than men in post-dissolution economic wellbeing and in changes in economic status. Black and Hispanic men and the three groups of women fare worse than White men, with Black women experiencing the highest levels of economic precarity.