Demography最新文献

This article establishes a new fact about immigration policies: granting legal status to undocumented immigrants has long-term effects on their formal employment and assimilation. We exploit the broad amnesty enacted in Italy in 2002, together with rich survey data collected in 2011 on a representative sample of immigrant households, to estimate the long-run effects of receiving legal amnesty. Immigrants who were not eligible for the amnesty have a 14% lower probability of working in the formal sector a decade later, are subject to more severe ethnic segregation on the job, and display less linguistic assimilation than those who obtained legal status through the amnesty.

Hypotheses explaining fertility levels in unions of women and men with different racial and ethnic origins (exogamous union fertility)-including stigma, in-between, pronatal, and assimilative fertility-apply equally when the minority group partner is the woman or the man. As an alternative, we propose a gendered theorizing of exogamous union fertility in which the fertility preferences of either the woman's or the man's racial and ethnic group might dominate. Our analyses reveal strong support for male-predominant patterns: the couple's fertility is nearer to that in an endogamous union of the man's racial and ethnic group than to that of an endogamous union of the woman's racial and ethnic group. We conjecture that women selecting into exogamous unions to realize their own individual fertility preferences might partially explain this finding. We find no cases of female predominance, in which the couple's fertility is nearer to that in an endogamous union of the woman's racial and ethnic group than that of an endogamous union of the man's racial and ethnic group. In addition, using a simple fertility model in which both the woman's and the man's racial and ethnic groups are included as predictors, we find that only the man's coefficients are statistically and substantively significant. A critical implication of our findings is that the standard demographic practice of using the woman's racial and ethnic group will increasingly downwardly bias estimates of fertility differences by race and ethnicity in the United States as exogamy becomes increasingly common.

Work is an important contributor to racial and ethnic disparities in health across the life course. Because functional limitations at older ages are associated with accumulated physical wear and tear throughout life, investigating work-related mechanisms that differentially expose Black and Hispanic Americans to difficult material circumstances over time is an important step toward understanding these disparities. Using a new data source of lifetime work histories from the Health and Retirement Study, this study investigates the role of accumulated years of physically demanding work (PDW) through middle adulthood on the number of functional limitations at age 60 (FL60). This study also assesses whether cumulative PDW accounts for the observed differences in FL60 among U.S.-born Black, Hispanic, and White respondents. We find that cumulative PDW is strongly associated with FL60 and partially accounts for the racial and ethnic gap in FL60 in the presence of extensive control variables. We also demonstrate that a traditional regression model underestimates the Black-White and Black-Hispanic differences in FL60 compared with a marginal structural model with an inverse probability of treatment weighting approach. Our results illustrate the importance of studying work from a life course perspective that ultimately influences the health of the diverse, aging U.S. population.

Disparities in educational trajectories and outcomes of segregated social groups concern population scientists and policymakers worldwide. This study examines the role of decision-making processes in generating educational disparities across groups in a segregated society. We argue that the unequal opportunity structure associated with segregation yields systematic disparities in decision-making that underlie choices, resulting in suboptimal outcomes for disadvantaged social groups. We test this argument using unique administrative records on the college application choices of Jewish and Arab applicants to universities in Israel, a country characterized by pronounced segregation, educational disparities, and labor market stratification. The data and settings allow us to isolate factors frequently used to explain disparities in university application choices by discounting costs, geographic proximity, and information constraints. Results from conditional logit (choice) models reveal group variations in how academically equivalent applicants weigh program characteristics, leading to significant disparities in the incidence of academic mismatch. These variations explain a substantial portion of the gap in university admissions between Jewish and Arab applicants. These findings demonstrate that stratified decision-making processes are an important link between segregation and inequality in life chances.

We use the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to investigate whether and how intergenerational income stratification mediates the long arm of childhood income for mature adult health. Using three different mediation techniques, we analyze prospective high-quality data on childhood income (ages 0-17) and six health outcomes (ages 40-67): self-rated health, psychological distress, heart attack, stroke, and life-threatening and non-life-threatening chronic conditions. We focus on the mediating role of adult income (ages 30-39). For comparison, we also analyze several alternative potential mediators, including education, health behaviors, and occupation. The results show that adult income is a critical mediator in the long arm of childhood income, mediating almost all the relationship for self-rated health and psychological distress, roughly one half of the relationship for heart attack and stroke, and roughly one third of the relationship for life-threatening chronic conditions. The models also confirm that childhood income has a significant mediated or indirect relationship with health outcomes. Further analyses provide evidence that adult income plays a greater mediating role than the alternative potential mediators. Altogether, the evidence supports intergenerational income stratification as a key mediating process within the long arm of childhood income.

This study examines the effects of communal violence-violence inflicted on a particular group along ethnic or religious lines-on women's marital outcomes. Communal violence, with its accompanying psychological and physical trauma, can have important socioeconomic consequences. The 2002 Gujarat riots stand out as one of the most significant and abrupt occurrences of communal violence in post-independence India. The riots were marked by widespread violence against women, providing a setting to study the impacts of violence on women. Using individual-level survey data from India and a difference-in-differences approach, the study shows that women's age at marriage decreased and their probability of marrying before age 18 increased after the Hindu-Muslim riots in Gujarat in 2002. Event-study and synthetic control methods suggest that these effects were prominent two years after the riots and have increased over time. Women who married after the riots also had fewer years of education and poorer social and economic status, such as a lower probability of employment and lower autonomy in household decision-making.

The latter half of the twentieth century saw dramatic increases in mothers' labor force participation rates, accompanied by declining job quality and increasing labor market inequality. Despite evidence of growing labor market inequality in wages and benefits, less is known about how job quality changed with respect to work schedules. This study tests the hypothesis that mothers' employment in jobs with nonstandard schedules increased between 1988 and 2019 and that such schedules are increasingly concentrated among mothers with lower education levels, single mothers, and mothers of color, who are overrepresented in low-wage jobs. We find that mothers' employment in jobs with nonstandard schedules stayed relatively flat at 15% to 16%, and the prevalence of weekend work increased from 15% to 18%. Moreover, we find growing disparities in who works nonstandard schedules. The propensity to work such schedules increased among mothers with less than a college degree, single mothers living without other adults, and Black mothers relative to mothers with a college degree, married mothers, and White mothers, respectively. Additionally, mothers are more likely to work nonstandard schedules for involuntary reasons than before the Great Recession.

Research indicates that a new pattern of motherhood well-being advantage emerged in the 2010s for U.S. women. Although scholars have argued that maternal mental health worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic, whether the parenthood mental health gap changed during the pandemic is unclear. Using data from the National Health Interview Survey (N  =  29,241), this study examines the parenthood gap in yearly and quarterly changes in anxiety and depression during 2019-2021 for women aged 18-59, with attention to variation by partnership status. The results show that changes in anxiety and depression prevalence were similar across parental and partnership statuses, with indications that maternal advantages expanded among women who were single. In October-December 2020, anxiety prevalence increased more for single women without minor children of their own living in the household ("nonmothers") than for single or partnered mothers. In April-June 2021, anxiety declined among mothers, especially single mothers, but remained higher than before the pandemic among single nonmothers. Some of these group differences in anxiety changes became nonsignificant after we controlled for household economic conditions, which were better in 2021 than in 2019 for all groups, particularly single mothers. In sum, trends in motherhood mental health advantages continued throughout the pandemic.

Will the extra years of life gained by the increase in life expectancy be lived in good or poor health? Because forecasts support social, economic, and medical decisions, as well as individuals' choices, there is a clear rationale for forecasting healthy life expectancy (HLE). However, only a limited number of models are available to forecast HLE. We suggest two models to forecast health and mortality simultaneously and coherently. One model is based on the Sullivan method to estimate HLE, and the second one is based on the multistate life table method. Both models use Compositional Data Analysis to account for the coherence between health and mortality. Mortality and health at age 50 and older is forecast for French, Spanish, Swedish, and United Kingdom females. Both models provide nonsignificantly different estimates and forecasts of HLE, in most cases. In addition, the models can improve forecast accuracy compared with other forecast models.

Measures of kinship size are increasingly common in sociodemographic studies. The size and structure of older adults' kinship networks can be ascertained via direct observation in a social survey or modeled using demographic techniques. Each approach has advantages and disadvantages, but whether the two provide comparable estimates of kinship size is an open question. In this research note, we answer this question using social survey data and demographic models to estimate the size of older adults' kinship networks in 22 European countries. We find an impressively high association between the two approaches, with important variations by the kin type considered. We discuss the reasons for the divergence in the estimates and provide guidance for researchers interested in using either approach to quantify kinship size.