Journal of Family and Economic Issues最新文献

Tandas, the Mexican variation of lending circles, are an informal financial practice used among Mexican American communities. Tandas are an important asset in families' resource management strategies, yet the practice is largely unrecognized in the resource management literature and devalued by traditional financial institutions. A qualitative study was conducted to investigate tanda participation of twelve Mexican American individuals across the midwestern United States. This study aimed to develop a better understanding of participants' motivations to enter, the other financial management strategies employed by participants, and the tanda's significance to family resource management. Findings revealed that participants' motivations to participate in a tanda relate to financial accessibility and cultural preferences; participants utilize a range of complementary financial management strategies concurrently with the tanda; and participants perceived the tanda as conducive to their family's financial goals and well-being, despite acknowledging the risks associated with participation. Developing a better understanding of the tanda provides insights into the ways culture serves as a conduit through which family and individual goals are realized, financial capability is bolstered, and uncertainty wrought by economic and political contexts is reduced.

With shorter durations and fewer barriers to entry, reskilling programs may serve as vehicles for social mobility and equity, as well as tools for creating a more adaptive workforce and inclusive economy. Nevertheless, much of the limited large-scale research on these types of programs was conducted prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, given the social and economic disruptions spurred by the pandemic, our ability to understand the impact of these types of programs in recent labor market conditions is limited. We fill this gap by leveraging three waves of a longitudinal household financial survey collected across all 50 US states during the pandemic. Through descriptive and inferential methods, we explore the sociodemographic characteristics related to reskilling and associated motivations, facilitators, and barriers, as well as the relationships between reskilling and measures of social mobility. We find that reskilling is positively related to entrepreneurship and, for Black respondents, to optimism. Moreover, we find that reskilling is not merely a tool for upward social mobility, but also economic stability. However, our results demonstrate that reskilling opportunities are stratified across race/ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic status through both formal and informal mechanisms. We close with a discussion of implications for policy and practice.

The carer-employee experience has undergone multiple shifts during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study seeks to understand how changes in the workplace as a result of the pandemic have impacted employed carers with their ability to perform both care obligations and paid work responsibilities. Using an online workplace-wide survey at a large Canadian firm, we conducted an environmental scan of: the current state of workplace supports and accommodations, supervisor attitudes, and carer-employee burden and health. Our findings demonstrate that while employees are generally in good health, care burden and time spent caregiving has been higher during COVID-19. Notably, employee presenteeism is higher during the pandemic than it was previously, with carer-employees experiencing significantly reduced levels of co-worker support. The most common workplace adaptation to COVID-19, work-from-home, was preferred by all employees as it allowed greater schedule control. However, this comes at the cost of reduced communications and sense of workplace culture, especially for carer-employees. We identified several actionable changes within the workplace, including: greater visibility of existing carer resources, and standardized training of managers on carer issues.

As an absolute measure of deprivation poverty fails to capture the impact pandemic-related disruptions had on households. In this study, we use data from the Ypsilanti COVID-19 Study, a cross-sectional survey of 609 residents taken during the summer of 2020, to control for pandemic-related disruptions on bill-paying and food hardship. Using logistic regression models in which specific forms of bill-paying (i.e. late paying rent, late paying utilities) and food hardships (i.e. eating less over 7 days, worried food will run out) served as dependent variables, we find that disruptions to household finances, particularly job loss, significantly increased the likelihood of experiencing bill-paying and food hardship, respectively. Our study also controls for the type of hardship experienced to see which strategies households employed during the pandemic to exit material hardship. Through logistic regression models on methods of exiting material hardship, we find the type of hardship experienced was not predictive of applying for either SNAP or UI. Moreover, we find UI was less accessible to low-income individuals experiencing hardship. The findings from our study elaborate the relationship between pandemic-related disruptions and material hardship, and indicate to policymakers that preventing hardship in the first place is much more meaningful to households than attempting to use policy to bring households out of hardship once they experience it.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the relationship between household employment insecurity and the risk of children's exposure to household material deprivation in Spain and Portugal. Specifically, using EU-SILC microdata for 2012, 2016 and 2020, it examines how this relationship evolved during the Post-Great Recession period. Although in both countries there was an improvement in the employment situation of individuals and families after the Great Recession, the main findings reflect an increase in the risk of children's exposure to material deprivation in households where no adults have a secure job. However, there are some differences between the two countries. In the case of Spain, the results seem to indicate that the incidence of household employment insecurity on material deprivation was higher in 2016 and 2020 than in 2012. In Portugal, the increase in the effect of employment insecurity on deprivation seems to have occurred only in 2020, the year the Covid-19 pandemic began.