Social Science Research最新文献

Despite the rapid growth of private tutoring, previous studies have not systematically addressed its implications for socioeconomic status (SES) disparities in education, as they have only separately examined differential access to and the effects of private tutoring. This study directly estimates the causal contribution of private tutoring to SES disparities in educational achievement and cognitive ability among Chinese middle school students. Using nationally representative longitudinal data and a novel gap-closing approach, we find that unequal access to private tutoring does not uniformally result in significant learning gaps between high- and low-SES students. When comparing disadvantaged students with their most socioeconomically advantaged peers, we find that the proportions of SES disparities attributed to differences in participation in and intensity of private tutoring increase with these differences. These findings have important policy implications for reducing SES disparities in learning outcomes.

Using data from the 1979 and 1997 National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth (NLSY), this study investigates the relationship between criminal justice system contact history, particularly incarceration, and being excluded from the financial system. Individual fixed effects estimates show that people who have been incarcerated have a lower likelihood of having a checking or savings account after incarceration. While this association could be due to justice-involved individuals avoiding formal systems like financial services, there is no evidence of a relationship between arrest history and being unbanked. Even adjusted for age and other factors, formerly incarcerated people are more likely to be unbanked in the years after release than before being incarcerated. This study offers further evidence on the challenges facing formerly incarcerated individuals, as well as for banking and financial services regulators seeking to expand financial inclusion efforts in the U.S.

Women are under-represented in political leadership roles, comprising only a quarter of national parliament members across the world. This is surprising, given women's comparatively high level of education and labor force participation. Why has women's political leadership lagged behind other indicators of gender equality? In this study, we revisit the importance of gender attitudes and examine the extent to which they shape women's share of parliament. Prior studies either examine gender attitudes by relying on cross-sectional research designs with small samples or adopt proxy measures that serve as crude indicators of gender ideology. We overcome these limitations by directly measuring gender attitudes from the World Values Survey and European Values Study, while adopting a panel design with a larger sample of countries and a more comprehensive set of controls. Drawing from our dataset of 275 observations across 101 countries during the 1995–2021 period, we find that our attitudinal measure, gender egalitarianism, wipes away most of the observed differences in women's share of parliament between world regions. Moreover, when we add two-way fixed effects, we find that a one-unit increase in a country's gender egalitarianism score is associated with an increase in women's parliament share by about four or five percentage points. Finally, we address concerns about endogeneity by replicating our results using two-stage least squares models with fixed effects. Overall, our findings suggest that gender ideology helps account for the growing success and persistent obstacles faced by women political candidates across the world.

This paper studies the interrelation between birth order and emigration adopting a family fixed-effects approach. We use register data on all persons in full-siblings groups born 1970–2002 in the entire Finnish-born population, and observe their first move abroad since age 18 in the period 1987–2020. The total number of siblings is 1,352,908, the total number of sibling groups 549,842, and the total number of first moves abroad 31,192. By comparing siblings in the same family, we effectively adjust for all time-invariant confounding from unobserved or unmeasured time-invariant variables. Emigration is found to be positively associated with birth order. The hazard of emigration for second-born siblings is 1.05 that of first borns, that of third borns 1.07, and that of fourth borns 1.11. The pattern is particularly marked for emigration to countries where there is free mobility, and the association is similar for both genders. Potential explanations to the birth order pattern may be variation in personality traits, risk-taking behaviours and aspirations between siblings, or differential allocation of resources and opportunities within families. The results highlight the importance of considering birth order within the context of family dynamics and individual mobility patterns, and they need to be extended to broader settings.

What effects do growth machine actors have on transformation of the built environment in terms of localities' enacted land-use policies and actual development? To the best of our knowledge, this study is among the first to answer this question for communities across the United States. We draw on the growth machine theory and speak to some of its proponents’ puzzling findings that policies designed to limit growth often facilitate it. Our analysis is grounded in the urban-quantitative tradition of large-sample studies of U.S. localities. We find that involvement of growth machine business actors in local government is related to transformation of the built environment as indicated by the issuance of new residential building permits. Intriguingly, involvement of local growth actors is also associated with greater use of land-use control policies, which, in turn, have positive rather than negative effects on issuance of new residential building permits. Thus, it seems growth machine actors support policies that outwardly appear to stymie growth, although they in practice do not. These findings suggest land-use policies are often designed with enough leeway for continued growth. Supporting such policies allows growth machine actors to publicly signal support for managed growth and environmental protection, although the reality on the ground remains business as usual.

Sexual minority young adults consistently report higher rates of depression than heterosexual young adults. Drawing on the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, this study examines if types of romantic relationships provide mental health benefits for lesbian, gay, and bisexual young adults. Further, analyses distinguish between same- and different-sex unions to help determine which relationship types offer the most mental health benefits. The results show that marriage is linked to fewer depressive symptoms for gay and lesbian young adults, compared to being unpartnered or in a dating relationship. Further, same-sex unions are associated with fewer depressive symptoms, but not different-sex unions. Yet, bisexual respondents’ depressive symptoms are not associated with romantic relationships, regardless of relationship type. The results suggest that it is important to address the stigma surrounding sexual minority status and same-sex relationships to improve the burden of depressive symptoms on sexual minority young adults.

As a neglected group, the number of return migrant children is growing with China's monumental volume of labor migration. Using data from 2013 to 2014 China Education Panel Survey, this study examines heterogeneous effects of return migration on children's mental health and cognitive outcomes. Our results show that the effects of return migration on children vary with the propensity for return migration. More importantly, when children are at risk of return migration, even if that risk is small, it already has a negative impact on children's mental health, which reminds us that it needs to take a dynamic view to study the impact of return migration on children. However, the impact of return migration is not all negative, and the findings suggest that return migration can promote the cognitive development of urban-origin migrant children. A striking regional difference emerges from our analysis: due to urban-rural gap, the impact of return migration on children from urban and rural areas is different. Specifically, return migration has a positive effect on the cognitive development of urban-origin migrant children while return migration does some harm to that of rural-origin migrant children, which implies that return migration may widen the gap between urban and rural children.

Parental separation is associated with a range of negative outcomes for children experiencing it, and there is ongoing scholarly and public interest in whether these associations reflect causal effects of parental separation. We estimate the effect of parental separation on children's educational achievement in Sweden using the proportion of male colleagues at the maternal workplace as an instrumental variable for parental separation. We discuss our instrumental variable approach in the context of the literature on the heterogeneous effects of parental separation. In the empirical analysis, we use population register data on 387,411 Swedish children born between 1990 and 1996 and measure educational achievement through their grade point averages in the final year of compulsory schooling. We find that parental separation does not have a negative effect on educational achievement and that this result is robust across a range of specifications. We argue that our results are informative of the effects of a large share of parental separations, in which parents dissolve relatively well-functioning unions.

Employees in today's workplace express strong desire for policies allowing for temporal flexibility (e.g., paid time off, schedule change, working from home), yet these policies are underutilized even when employees have them. We argue that an occupational norm that emphasizes long work hours is a key to understanding this puzzle. Using individual-level data from the Leave Module of the 2011 American Time Use Survey (supplemented with the 2017–2018 version), matched with occupation-level data constructed from O*NET and the American Community Surveys, we show that individuals working in occupations with higher prevalence of “overwork” (defined by working 50 or more hours per week) are less likely to use paid leave. For flexible work policies, the same pattern is found for childless men, fathers, and childless women, but mothers are more likely to use them in occupations with higher prevalence of overwork. Our decomposition analysis shows that widespread overwork in professional and managerial occupations offsets much of what makes them amenable to the use of leave and flexible work policies, relative to other occupations. These findings suggest that even when policies are available, the success of flexible work policies largely depends on how organizations tackle the overwork norm.