Review of Economics of the Household最新文献

In 2020-21, parents' work-from-home days increased three-and-a-half-fold following the initial COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns compared to 2015-19. At the same time, many schools offered virtual classrooms and daycares closed, increasing the demand for household-provided childcare. Using weekday workday time diaries from American Time Use Survey and looking at parents in dual-earner couples, we examine parents' time allocated to paid work, chores, and childcare in the COVID-19 era by the couple's joint work location arrangements. We determine the work location of the respondent directly from their diary and predict the partner's work-from-home status. Parents working from home alone spent more time on childcare compared to their counterparts working on-site, though only mothers worked fewer paid hours. When both parents worked from home compared to on-site, mothers and fathers maintained their paid hours and spent more time on childcare, though having a partner also working from home reduced child supervision time. On the average day, parents working from home did equally more household chores, regardless of their partner's work-from-home status; however, on the average school day, only fathers working from home alone spent more time on household chores compared to their counterparts working on-site. We also find that mothers combined paid work and child supervision to a greater extent than did fathers.

We examine the response of rural Ugandan households to a large aggregate shock, the Covid-19 pandemic, during and one year after the first lockdown in March 2020. Using 6 rounds of phone surveys from 558 households in western Uganda, we find that household income recovery from the lockdown differs by whether households had a business pre-pandemic. After an initial sharp fall, the incomes of those without a business have recovered to pre-pandemic levels. However, the relatively better-off households with a business before the pandemic still have one-third lower income, due to sustained closure of businesses even after the end of the first lockdown restrictions. Additionally, business-owning households have 30% lower wealth one-year into the pandemic, driven by 44% lower assets, 45% drop in savings, and a 15 fold increase in net-borrowing, suggesting long-term damage. Our findings point to the need to support households who face dwindling finances to fall back on.

We study the added-worker effect in the Netherlands with large-scale administrative panel data for the period 1999-2015. Conditioning on samples with similar employment histories, we employ differences-in-differences to estimate the effect of a male partner's unemployment shock on the female partner's income. We find a modest added-worker effect of 2-5% of the male partner's income loss, as compared to the much larger compensating effect from social insurance schemes. The added-worker effect largely disappeared at the beginning of the Great Recession, but resurfaced a few years later. Over the years, profits from self-employment have become more important in dealing with unemployment shocks.

Due to the pandemic-induced economic crisis, self-employed individuals are currently suffering considerable income losses. The self-employed and the members in their households usually form an economic unit. As a consequence, the income cuts not only affect the self-employed themselves but also the rest of their household. We used the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) to calculate how much income the self-employed are able to sacrifice to achieve a subjective barely sufficient household income, which we interpret as the minimum level to maintain the standard of living. Our results suggest that full-time self-employed are typically the bread-earners in their households and that, as a consequence, even moderate income losses of the self-employed often lead to problems in maintaining the living standards of their households. Conditional on individual and household characteristics, the self-employed with employees are found to live in households that are less resilient to income losses. Furthermore, a negative correlation between falling short of the barely adequate household income and wellbeing was discovered. Self-employed in households with less than adequate incomes also reported higher concerns about social cohesion. These results have implications for policy - especially in light of the economic crisis induced by the pandemic.

Did the first wave of the COVID-19 epidemic and the various lockdown measures taken by European governments in the spring of 2020 impact individuals aged 50 and over differently according to their living arrangements and housing conditions? Focusing on three indicators of mental well-being, depression, loneliness and trouble sleeping, this paper answers the question using data on Europeans interviewed in the SHARE Corona Survey, fielded right after the first wave of the pandemic in summer 2020, linked longitudinally with two previous waves of SHARE (2013 and 2015). We find that the first wave of the pandemic changed the association between mental health and living arrangements and housing conditions. New to this pandemic period, the mental well-being of those who lived only with a spouse declined relative to the general population aged 50+. Relatedly, there was a protective impact for parents of having (adult) children in the same building as opposed to children, however close, who were not co-residing. Finally, living in cities and in multi-unit housing also led to a decrease in mental well-being relative to the general population aged 50+.

Job insecurity is one of the risks that workers face on the labour market. As with any risk, individuals can choose to insure against it, and we here consider marriage as one potential source of this insurance. The 1999 rise in the French Delalande tax, paid by larger private firms when they laid off workers aged 50 or over, led to an exogenous rise in job insecurity for the uncovered (younger workers) in these larger firms. A difference-in-differences analysis using French panel data reveals that this greater job insecurity for the under-50s led to a significant rise in their probability of marriage, and especially when the partner had greater job security, consistent with marriage providing insurance against labour-market risk.