We invite scholars to submit papers that examine the interplay of both policies that provide services (‘care’) and policies that provide financial support (‘cash’). Details are below:

Welfare states are in constant transition, with policy makers seeking solutions to address old and new social risks, while facing budget constraints. A useful distinction can be made between policies supporting well-being by providing ‘care’ in the form of public services, and policies providing ‘cash’ in the form of transfers. This distinction and changing balance between care and cash policies raises important new questions. To what extent may cash and care policies promote virtuous circles in welfare state reform? Are care policies adequately designed to compensate for reduced cash transfers? To what extent do cash and care policies depend on each other for maximum effectiveness and efficiency?

The general questions pertain to a wide range of policy areas. For instance, in labor market policy, the question can be raised whether active labor market programs (Bonoli, 2013) support employment adequately in order to compensate for reduced cash transfers in areas of unemployment and social assistance. In family policies, maternal employment are found to be higher in relation to work-family reconciliation policies such as childcare, but lower in relation to financial support policies as child benefits (Nieuwenhuis, Need, & Van Der Kolk, 2012). Yet, to reduce child poverty, both work-family (care) policies and financial transfers such as child benefits are thought essential and complementary (Maldonado & Nieuwenhuis, 2015). Policies can be distinguished that ensure care for the elderly through professional social services, and cash-for-care payments paying children to provide care for their elderly parents (Schmid, Brandt, & Haberkern, 2011). Publically funded education may have more equal outcomes when students can receive student grants to cover living expenses. Health and mortality are found not only to be affected by healthcare services, but also by minimum income benefits (Nelson & Fritzell, 2014). The effectiveness of public healthcare services may further depend on the presence of sickness benefits to allow patients to recover before having to go back to work.


This stream invites empirical papers that explicitly analyze the intersection of cash and care in welfare states, in any area of social policy. Contributions that examine policy developments, including the shift from cash to care, are welcome as well as contributions examining various types of policy outcomes.

Full details of all conference streams can be found at: http://espanetlisbon2017.eu/streams/

Deadline: March 15, 2017

The book, however, leaves the topic of gendered inequality largely unaddressed. Indeed, Milanovic discusses why an exclusive focus on horizontal inequality (inequality between groups, including gendered inequality) is undesirable, because it may lead to unproductive identity politics in relation to specific horizontal inequalities, and because it does not address the root cause of inequality. Yet, while relevant, these arguments do not convince that a greater emphasis on gendered inequalities would not have been informative regarding the measurement and explanations of global inequality. Below, I list three reasons why including a focus on gender can improve our understanding of trends in global inequality.

First, the analyses presented in ‘Global Inequality’ seem to implicitly assume that all income is shared equally within the household. Indeed, incomes are equivalised to account for differences in household size and composition, but then it is assumed that there is no inequality within households in the degree to which women and men have equal access to, and control over, how to spend the household income. Admittedly, there is not so much empirical research that does account for such differences (Cantillon, 2013), but a literature on this topics seems to be emerging and indicating that women typically have less access to, and control over, household income (Bennett, 2013). Not accounting for this likely leads to understating levels of global inequality among individuals.

Secondly, the level of economic inequality between women and men is intrinsically linked to levels of inequality among households (Lam, 1997). Milanovic discussed how homogamy drives up inequality among households. This is true indeed, but the resulting correlation between partners’ earnings is typically quite low. In a recently published study, Nieuwenhuis Need, and Van der Kolk (2017), focusing on OECD countries from 1973 to 2013, showed how women’s rising earnings were indeed associated with a somewhat higher correlation between spouses’ incomes. But the same trend was also associated with a substantial decrease in inequality among women (living in coupled houseohlds). So, while inequality in household income increased due to the rising correlation between spouses’ income, it was reduced more by the decline of inequality in women’s incomes. Thus, the net effect has been that women’s rising incomes were a driving force reducing inequality among households – at least in rich democracies in recent decades.

Thirdly, levels of gender (in)equality vary substantially across countries and over time – even when just limiting our focus to economic inequality. Trends towards gender equality have been observed to stagnate in various countries (including the Nordic countries, where women’s employment rates have been comparatively high for a long period already) or even reverse like in the United States (Boushey, 2008). If inequality is rising in these countries, as shown by Milanovic, this could be related to stagnating gender inequality. At the same time, in other countries there is much more potential for further reducing household inequality by means of promoting gender equality. Furthermore, women’s (rising) incomes have contributed substantially to countries’ average income levels. On the one hand this means that countries in which trends towards gender equality are stagnating may see less growth in average income levels. On the other hand, it means that countries with high levels of gender inequality (in terms of economic participation) have the opportunity to foster growth in average incomes by stimulating women’s (equal) participation on the labour market. To the extent that these countries are poorer, such as China and India, promoting economic gender equality will thus also help these countries to catch up with the average income levels in richer countries – thus reducing global inequality.

Whether and to what extent trends in gender equality will affect future trends in global inequality remains an empirical question. But, together these arguments demonstrate that gender (in)equality is a driving force of inequality both within nations and between nations. Now, these points of critique are easily reaised, but very difficult to empirically substantiate (or refute). I don’t think Milanovic has the data to do so, and neither do I have them. In fact, I don’t think such data exists for a substantially long period of time. Yet, I think these comments are important to keep in mind when interpreting the evidence on long-term trends in global inequality, and when thinking about questions that beg answering in future research.

References

Bennett, F. (2013). Researching Within-Household Distribution: Overview, Developments, Debates, and Methodological Challenges. Journal of Marriage and Family, 75(3), 582–597. http://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12020

Boushey, H. (2008). “Opting out?” The effect of children on women's employment in the United States. Feminist Economics, 14(1), 1–36. http://doi.org/10.1080/13545700701716672

Cantillon, S. (2013). Measuring differences in living standards within households. Journal of Marriage and Family, 75, 598 – 610. (online)

Lam D (1997) Demographic variables and income inequality. In: Rosenzweig M and Stark O (eds) Handbook of Population and Family Economics. Amsterdam; New York: Elsevier, pp.1015–1059.

Milanovic, B. (2016). Global inequality: A new approach for the age of globalization. Harvard University Press. (Publisher’s website)

Nieuwenhuis, R., van der Kolk, H., & Need, A. (2017). Women's earnings and household inequality in OECD countries, 1973–2013. Acta Sociologica, 60(1), 3–20. http://doi.org/10.1177/0001699316654528

If you happen to be in New York and are interested in attending this talk, please contact me. There might be some ‘tickets’ available.

From the announcement:

Women’s employment rates have risen markedly across OECD countries in recent decades, although evidence is mounting that this trend is stagnating. Rense Nieuwenhuis will discuss how these trends have affected earnings inequality within and among coupled households, as well as poverty rates. His research is based on LIS data to cover OECD countries for about 3 decades. In his talk, he will also relate his findings to current policy developments in Europe.

Rense is a sociologist interested in how the interplay between social policies and demographic trends gives rise to economic inequalities. His publications appeared in the Journal of Marriage and Family and the European Sociological Review, among other journals. In 2014 he obtained a Phd (‘Cum Laude’) from the University of Twente in the Netherlands, and currently he is an assistant professor at the Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI).

Light refreshments will be provided. After the talk, all are welcome to join us for a social gathering at Bryant Park. 

In my note, titled Association, Aggregation, and Paradoxes: On the Positive Correlation Between Fertility and Women’s Employment, I respond to a recent article by Brehm and Engelhardt. Their article revisits the cross-country correlation between total fertility rates (TFR) and female labour force participation rates (FLFP). The interesting thing about this correlation is that it turned from from negative to positive after 1985. My disagreement with their (otherwise excellent) article is that the pre-1985 negative correlation is taken as support for the hypothesis that for women having young children and being employed are (partially) incompatible, implying that the correlation turning positive contradicts that hypothesis regarding the later period.

My note provides three comments on why this cross-country correlation is not informative to critically test hypotheses on the degree to which women combine motherhood and employment:

1. The macro-level correlation across countries turned positive due to decreasing fertility in southern European countries, but this was hardly associated with more female labour force participation. This is not in line with the notion that within countries higher fertility was associated with more employment.
2. There is a whole literature on aggregation paradoxes, that dictate that correlations on different levels of aggregation can have opposite signs. So, a positive correlation at the aggregate country-level is not informative regarding a correlation at the individual level
3. In my own study in Journal of Marriage and Family I used individual-level data to find that mothers were still (substantially) less likely to be employed than women without children. Moreover, in various countries the individual-level association between motherhood and employment did not change at all in the period that the country-level correlation turned positive.

The original article by Brehm & Engelhardt and my response are available online from the Demographic Research website. Those who follow my research will recognise some arguments that were developed in my dissertation (Family Policy Outcomes).

On a final note, the editorial team of Demographic Research has been incredibly efficient in processing this note, and seem very committed to facilitate academic debate in their journal. The whole process (from submitting to publishing) took just a couple of days, and given that the original paper was published only a week ago, this makes for a timely discussion.

Better one control variable in your mind, than 10 in your model.

A key challenge in country-comparative research is the limited number of (control) variables that can be accounted for simultaneously. But then again, often too many variables are included in models anyway, I think. Without critical thought, such sheer amount of control variables may do more harm than good.

Recently, a good example was discussed by Andrew Gelman – who argued against controlling for post-treatment variables. Gelman responded to a study finding that “The more money that parents provide for higher education, the lower the grades their children earn.” It turned out that the study included a very important post-treatment control: “whether the student is employed during school”. So, the most plausible causal mechanism (parents pay -> students don’t have to work and therefore have more time to study –> better grades) is completely blocked out, therefore unable to drive the parameter estimate.

In my own research, combining person-level and country-level data, I was limited in the number of control variables I could have. On the person-level, this was due to the lack of comparable measurements across countries and over time. At the country-level, on the other hand, I could have selected for quite an abundance of country-level control variables. However, the number of country-year level observations was still relatively low – and the specified regression models were quite complex. Hence, the number of controls had to be limited. I decided to control only for labour market structure in tested the effects of family policy outcomes. In my mind, it makes sense to control for factors directly shaping the employment opportunities of women when investigating the effects of policies also affecting these opportunities.

Technically, it has become easy to estimate highly complex regression models with many variables. This often makes a lot of sense to do, but if one is not careful the results become uninterpretable, or the correct interpretation of a parameter estimate changes – for instance because of controlling for a post-treatment variable. In any case: controls can be great but only after careful consideration.

——
This is a series on the 10 propositions that are part of my PhD dissertation. These propositions are a Dutch tradition to highlight key findings of a dissertation and some additional insights by the author. My dissertation is titled “Family Policy Outcomes: Combining Institutional and Demographic Explanations of Women’s Employment and Earnings Inequality in OECD countries, 1975-2005″ and I will defend my dissertation on January 10 2014. So, this series is also a count down. Find out more about my dissertation.

Country-comparative questions are sometimes best answered by using person-level data.

The goal of my dissertation was to answer country-comparative questions and yet I have consistently used person-level (and household-level) data to answer these questions. As this inevitably results in all kinds of complexities, one can wonder why I took this road.

Clearly, some of the answers I arrived at were suggested by previous studies as well. Indeed, based on analyses of country-level data we had quite a firm understanding that reconciliation policies improve women’s employment. But there are several disadvantages in using country-level data, that were summarized by Kittel using the term ‘Crazy Methodology’ (see Chapter 1 of my dissertation for more a more detailed discussion on this topic).

However, the most important reason for me to use person-level data to answer country-comparative research is to provide stronger tests of hypotheses on family policy outcomes and to answer new country-comparative questions. This led to various new insights. To name three:

• Whereas family policies typically affect only mothers, a labor market characterized by a large service sector stimulates the employment of all women: both mothers and women without children. With only country-level data, we could not have made this distinction.
• Reconciliation policies were found to be more effective among higher educated women (see also proposition 3)
• Reconciliation policies were found to reduce earnings inequality both within and between households, and financial support policies were found to increase these inequalities. This is in line with proposition 5: Family policy arrangements that facilitate smaller earnings inequality within households also reduce inequality between households.

Thus, country-comparative questions are sometimes best answered by using person-level data, particularly when dealing with differences within countries.

——
This is a series on the 10 propositions that are part of my PhD dissertation. These propositions are a Dutch tradition to highlight key findings of a dissertation and some additional insights by the author. My dissertation is titled “Family Policy Outcomes: Combining Institutional and Demographic Explanations of Women’s Employment and Earnings Inequality in OECD countries, 1975-2005″ and I will defend my dissertation on January 10 2014. So, this series is also a count down. Find out more about my dissertation.

On the other hand, the findings in Chapter 5 suggested that women’s earnings have a strong tendency to decrease inequality between households. Our analyses showed that family policy arrangements that facilitate women’s employment women contributed a larger share of total household earnings, and earnings inequality among women was relatively low. Indeed, it women’s earnings were found to attenuate inequality between households to a larger extent in countries with extensive reconciliation policies and limited financial support policies. Countries with family policy arrangements that facilitate women’s employment and consequently smaller earnings inequalities within households also contribute to smaller in- equalities between households.

The Chapter thus gave rise to the following proposition:

Family policy arrangements that facilitate smaller earnings inequality within households also reduce inequality between households.

The complete abstract of this Chapter reads:

This Chapter examines to what extent family policies have affected earnings inequality within and between coupled households. In Chapter 5 cross-country variation was found in the degree to which women’s earnings attenuate earnings inequality between households. In this Chapter we explain this variation with reconciliation policies and financial support policies. We used person-level data from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS, 2013) on 572,222 coupled households, covering the period from 1981 to 2005 in 18 OECD countries. These data were combined with country-level data from the Comparative Maternity, Parental, and Childcare Database (Gauthier, 2010). In countries with extensive reconciliation policies women contributed a larger share of total household earnings, and earnings inequality among women was relatively low. In societies with extensive financial support policies, women contributed a smaller share to total household earnings, and inequality among the earnings of women was relatively high. Women’s earnings were found to attenuate inequality between households to a larger extent in countries with extensive reconciliation policies and limited financial support policies. Countries with family policy arrangements that facilitate women’s employment and consequently smaller earnings inequalities within households also contribute to smaller inequalities between households.

——
This is a series on the 10 propositions that are part of my PhD dissertation. These propositions are a Dutch tradition to highlight key findings of a dissertation and some additional insights by the author. My dissertation is titled “Family Policy Outcomes: Combining Institutional and Demographic Explanations of Women’s Employment and Earnings Inequality in OECD countries, 1975-2005″ and I will defend my dissertation on January 10 2014. So, this series is also a count down. Find out more about my dissertation.

The conditions for women’s earnings to increase inequality between households are hard to meet.

With women’s increasing participation on the labour market, the question has often been raised how their earnings have affected earnings inequality between households. Early during my sociology training I learned that the inequality between households would be bigger than inequality between individuals. I thought it made sense, as coupled household with two earners can accumulate more resources (e.g. earnings) than a single person (household) can. Add educational homogamy to the mix, and there is a strong reason to expect women’s earnings to increase inequality between households. Hence, I was not surprised when I read Esping-Andersen’s statement that the “conditions required for an equalizing effect [of women’s earnings] are quite steep”.

It is, however, a “common misconception” (Lam, 1997) that a positive correlation between spouses’ earnings is a sufficient condition for women’s earnings to increase inequalities between households. Instead, the contribution of women’s earnings to inequality between households depends on the correlation between spouses’ earnings, the earnings inequality among women (relative to inequality among men), and the share of women’s earnings in total household earnings. It turned out, that the correlation between spouses’ earnings was positive, but not high enough for women’s earnings to increase the inequality between households.

So, that is why this Chapter concludes by stating that the conditions for women’s earnings to increase inequality between households are hard to meet.

The abstract of this Chapter reads:

In this Chapter we show that women’s earnings attenuate inequality between coupled households, even though the earnings of spouses are positively correlated. We use data from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS, 2013) on 572,222 coupled households, covering the period from 1981 to 2005 in 18 OECD countries. Three trends are described. Firstly, over time women’s earnings increasingly contributed to total household earnings, thereby increasing equality within households. Secondly, the positive correlation between spouses’ earnings increased over time. Thirdly, earnings inequality among women declined. With a counter-factual decomposition technique on earnings inequality, we show that the combined effect of these trends was that women’s earn- ings increasingly attenuated earnings inequality between households. The trend towards women’s earnings increasingly attenuating the inequality between households was mainly driven by decreasing inequal- ity among women. If inequality among women had not declined as it did in recent decades, inequality between households would have been 25% higher than it actually was in 2005.

——
This is a series on the 10 propositions that are part of my PhD dissertation. These propositions are a Dutch tradition to highlight key findings of a dissertation and some additional insights by the author. My dissertation is titled “Family Policy Outcomes: Combining Institutional and Demographic Explanations of Women’s Employment and Earnings Inequality in OECD countries, 1975-2005″ and I will defend my dissertation on January 10 2014. So, this series is also a count down. Find out more about my dissertation.

People don’t just act out of interest; they also need opportunities.

This third proposition refers to one of the key theoretical contributions of my dissertation, tested in Chapter 4. A lot of research on (family) policy outcomes only focus on the characteristics of policy. In my case, my hypotheses in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 of my dissertation were derived from the assumption that policies provide opportunities.

In Chapter 4 of my dissertation I argue that opportunities for employment will only be effective for those (women) with an interest in employment. In other words, the outcomes of opportunities are dependent on the interests of the actors.

From this I derived the hypothesis that reconciliation policies are more effective among higher educated women. This hypothesis was supported by the empirical analyses. The hypothesis that financial support policies were more effective among lower educated women, however, had to be rejected, although it was shown that financial support policies suppress the employment of mothers of all educational levels.

The summary of the Chapter reads:

In Chapter 2 we found that the size of the motherhood-employment gap was reduced by reconciliation policies and increased by financial support policies for families. In this Chapter, we answered the question of to what extent the outcomes of reconciliation policies and financial support policies differ between more and less educated mothers. Thus, we challenged the theoretical assumption held in Chapters 2 and 3 that all mothers are equally affected by family policies. Our data were obtained from the ‘Comparative Motherhood-Employment Gap Trend File’, combined with country-level data from the Comparative Maternity, Parental, and Childcare Database (Gauthier & Bortnik, 2001). The data covered 17 OECD countries, the period from 1980 to 1999, and 116,874 observations on individual women living in partnered households. The data were analysed using multilevel logistic regression. We found that paid leave – a reconciliation policy – reduces the motherhood-employment gap more strongly among more educated women than among the less educated.

——
This is a series on the 10 propositions that are part of my PhD dissertation. These propositions are a Dutch tradition to highlight key findings of a dissertation and some additional insights by the author. My dissertation is titled “Family Policy Outcomes: Combining Institutional and Demographic Explanations of Women’s Employment and Earnings Inequality in OECD countries, 1975-2005″ and I will defend my dissertation on January 10 2014. So, this series is also a count down. Find out more about my dissertation.

It is too simple to only think of childcare leave as a mechanism of inclusion of women in the labour market, as it can also be a mechanism of exclusion.

With this proposition I respond to various studies addressing the question whether there is such a thing as too long childcare leave. Moreover, I address how it is possible that I found (in Chapter 2 of my dissertation) that leave increases mothers’ employment, whereas other authors (most prominently Pettit and Hook, in their Gendered Tradeoffs Book) found that leave reduces mothers’ employment. I not only hypothesize a curvilinear effect of leave with short periods of leave improving women’s employment and (overly) long periods of leave reducing women’s employment, but also suggest several methodological improvements.

I tested the hypotheses using the Comparative Motherhood-Employment Gap Trend File on 192,484 individual women, 305 country-years, and 18 countries, combined with country- level data from the Comparative Maternity, Parental, and Childcare Database. The abstract reads:

In Chapter 2 we found that longer childcare leave facilitates women’s employment by reducing the size of the motherhood-employment gap. In this Chapter we follow up on this finding and test whether women’s employment is facilitated in societies with short-term childcare leave but negatively affected in societies with very long periods of child- care leave. We start by stating that this ‘long-leave question’ has not yet been satisfactorily answered. We argued that to correctly answer the long-leave question (1.) the relationship between duration of leave and employment of women should be explicitly hypothesised as being curvilinear and (2.) childcare leave should be expected to affect only mothers, not women without children. Based on this we formulated the long-leave hypothesis: In countries with short periods of childcare leave the motherhood-employment gap is smaller than in countries with no childcare leave, but in countries with long periods of childcare leave the motherhood-employment gap is larger than in countries with short periods of leave. In addition, we argued that to test the long-leave hypothesis one should use data in which countries are observed repeatedly over time, and one should evaluate for the presence of influential data. This can be done using the ‘Comparative Motherhood-Employment Gap Trend File’ on 192,484 individual women, 305 country-years, and 18 countries, combined with country-level data from the Comparative Maternity, Parental, and Childcare Database (Gauthier & Bortnik, 2001). We found that in countries with short periods of childcare leave the motherhood-employment gap is smaller than in countries with no childcare leave, while in countries with long periods of childcare leave the motherhood-employment gap is bigger than in countries with short periods of leave.

The findings, thus, indeed show that long periods of leave exclude women from the labour market, but it was also shown that relatively short periods of childcare leave include women into the labour market. So, leave works as intended, but it can be overdone.

——
This is a series on the 10 propositions that are part of my PhD dissertation. These propositions are a Dutch tradition to highlight key findings of a dissertation and some additional insights by the author. My dissertation is titled “Family Policy Outcomes: Combining Institutional and Demographic Explanations of Women’s Employment and Earnings Inequality in OECD countries, 1975-2005″ and I will defend my dissertation on January 10 2014. So, this series is also a count down. Find out more about my dissertation.

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