BACKGROUND Time shared with a partner is an indicator of marital well-being and couples wants to spend time together. However, time with a partner depends on work and family arrangements as well as the policies, norms and values that prevail in society. Contrary to time spent with children, couples shared time in cross-national context is relatively unstudied. Previous studies from specific countries show that dual-earner couples spend less time together and that parents spend less time alone together. OBJECTIVE The aim of our study is to investigate partnered parents' shared time across countries to understand how social conditions, cultural norms and policy contexts are related to the amount and nature of couples shared time. Specifically, we compare time with a partner in the US, France and Spain. METHODS We use data from the Multinational Time Use Study, a harmonized collection of time diary data that includes information on individuals daily activities and sociodemographic characteristics. We leverage information about with whom activities are done to examine three types of time shared with a partner: total time with a partner indicates the minutes per day spent in the presence of a partner; exclusive time corresponds to the minutes per day spent alone with a partner when no one else is present; and family time indicates the minutes per day spent with a partner and a child at the same time. RESULTS Our results show that American couples spend the least time together and Spanish couples spend the most time together. Parents in France spend the most time alone together. The most striking difference across countries is in time with a partner and children, which is much higher among Spanish families. CONCLUSION Paid work constraints explain a small part of the differences in couples shared time that we observe between countries. Differences in couples shared time across countries seem to be related to social norms surrounding family and general time use.

Although many theoretical arguments have been made linking racism to high mortality and lower life expectancy among African Americans, studies to date have been unable to measure racism directly to determine the strength of the its effect on health and well-being. Here we take advantage of a new internet-based method to measure interstate variation in anti-black sentiment and connect it to cross-state variation in mortality and life expectancy. Estimates of a structural equations model indicate that racism: increases the rate of black homicide through the intervening variable of racial segregation; raises infant mortality through the intervening variable of low birth weight; and increases mortality from diabetes and heart disease through the intervening variable of obesity. Excess deaths from infant mortality, diabetes, and heart disease in turn act to lower black life expectancy, and racism has a direct effect in reducing black life chances as well. Varying the level of racism from its lowest to highest observed level across states is sufficient to shift black life expectancy by an estimated 3.9 years.

Population aging is requiring a re-examination of the role of eldercare. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly one in five U.S. residents will be age 65 or older in 2030 (see Denton 2012 BLS Monthly Labor Review). In particular, unpaid eldercare is an important issue, as elder care is often provided by a family member or friends. Unpaid caregivers often experience what is called caregiver strain, defined as psychological, emotional, and/or physical strain through the act of caregiving. In this paper, we examine the extent to which the relationship between providing eldercare and subjective well-being may operate through the time constraints caregivers face, hypothesizing that the act of providing care takes time away from other activities. In addition, while the majority of caregivers are women, we test for possible gender differences in the relationship between elder caregiving, time allocation and subjective well-being. Using the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) for 2012 and 2013, of 21728 respondents, 3503 (16%) reported to have provided eldercare to a person older than 65. 61% of them were women. Our findings suggest that eldercare providers report lower level of life satisfaction as well as higher proportion are not well rested. Eldercare providers also reports less time in personal care and social activities.

The shift to more time-intensive and child-centered parenting in the United States is widely assumed to be positively linked to healthy child development, but implications for adult well-being are ...

Research studies and popular accounts of parenting have documented the joys and strains of raising children. Much of the literature comparing parents with those without children indicates a happiness advantage for those without children, although recent studies have unpacked this general advantage to reveal differences by the dimension of well-being considered and important features in parents lives and parenting experiences. We use unique data from the 2010, 2012, and 2013 American Time Use Survey to understand emotions in mothering experiences and how these vary by key demographic factors: employment and partnership status. Assessing mothers emotions in a broad set of parenting activities while controlling for a rich set of person and activity-level factors, we find that mothering experiences are generally associated with high levels of emotional well-being, although single parenthood is associated with differences in the emotional valence. Single mothers report less happiness and more sadness, stress, and fatigue in parenting than partnered mothers, and these reports are concentrated among those single mothers who are not employed. Employed single mothers are happier and less sad and stressed when parenting than single mothers who are not employed. Contrary to common assumptions about maternal employment, we find overall few negative associations between employment and mothers feelings regarding time with children, with the exception that employed mothers report more fatigue in parenting than those who are not employed.

The economic status of women in Georgia is a key factor in the overall health and future of the state’s economy. Women represent a majority of Georgia’s adult population[1] and nearly half of the workforce.[2] In more than half of all Georgia households with children, women are primary or co-breadwinners.[3] Despite their importance, women face a host of barriers keeping them and Georgia’s economy, from reaching their full potential. Women working full-time in Georgia earn, on average, 70 cents for every dollar white men earn.[4] The gender wage gap is even wider once part-time workers are taken into account. Georgia stands to gain a lot by removing these barriers to equal earnings for working women and their families. The state’s economy could add a staggering $14.4 billion if all working women in Georgia earned the same amount of money as men living in similar population areas, of the same age, education level and working the same number of hours.[5] Even more money could be added to Georgia’s economy if women who are now not working got more support, including child care and health care, which can allow them to rejoin the workforce or work more hours. Increasing earnings for Georgia women can also provide a powerful boost to working families themselves. Lower earnings for Georgia women make it more likely they and their families will live in poverty, which carries a host of negative implications for the future of the state’s workforce and overall well-being. Poverty for Georgia’s working women could fall by nearly half if women earned the same amount of money as men in comparable circumstances.[6] Lower pay also makes it harder for women to afford health care which is essential to their heath and overall well-being.

There are persistent differences in self-reported subjective well-being across US metropolitan areas, and residents of declining cities appear less happy than others. Yet some people continue to move to these areas, and newer residents appear to be as unhappy as longer-term residents. While historical data on happiness are limited, the available facts suggest that cities that are now declining were also unhappy in their more prosperous past. These facts support the view that individuals do not maximize happiness alone but include it in the utility function along with other arguments. People may trade off happiness against other competing objectives.

Research on family structure and child well-being rarely includes children in same-sex parent families, a notable omission since 28 % of female–female couple households contain children. Using the 2010–2013 pooled current population survey (CPS), we examined children’s economic well-being by family structure. These data were ideal for this study because they included a sizeable number of children in same-sex cohabiting mother families and the CPS measured both official and supplemental poverty, incorporating the cohabiting partner. Using the official poverty measure, children in same-sex cohabiting mother families were more likely to be poor than their counterparts in either different-sex cohabiting or married parent families. Using the supplemental poverty measure, children in same-sex mother families were no more likely to be poor than children in all other types of different-sex two-parent families.

This study shows that state efforts at child protection are structured by the policy regimes in which they are enmeshed. Using administrative data on child protection, criminal justice, and social welfare interventions, I show that children are separated from their families and placed into foster care far more frequently in states with extensive and punitive criminal justice systems than in states with broad and generous welfare programs. However, large welfare bureaucracies interact with welfare program enrollment to create opportunities for the surveillance of families, suggesting that extensive and administratively complex welfare states engage in soft social control through the surveillance and regulation of family behavior. The article further shows that institutionalization, a particularly restrictive form of foster care placement, is least common in states with broad and generous welfare regimes and generally more common under punitive regimes. Taken together, these findings show that policy regimes influence the interaction between families and the state through their proximate effects on family structure and well-being and through institutional effects that delimit the routines and scripts through which policymakers and street-level bureaucrats intervene to protect children.

How much of the dispersion in lifetime earnings, wealth, consumption, and ultimately, utility or well-being is resolved early in life (prior to working life) vs. later? This critical question has received much attention, with influential recent contributions coming from Keane and Wolpin (1997), Storesletten et al. (2005), and Huggett et al. (2011). The goal of this paper is to provide quantitative measures of how the full range of households' investment (and financing) opportunities matters for the fraction of lifetime inequality determined relatively early in life relative to later on. We focus on the role played by three specific investment opportunities: risky and lumpy college education, risky equity, and costly borrowing. To our knowledge, our work is the first to provide quantitative measures of the importance of each in the temporal resolution of lifetime inequality and the importance of the interaction between them. We find, first, that nearly all income inequality is attributable to human * The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond or the Federal Reserve System. ¶ Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, ivan.vidangos@frb.gov 1 capital variation as of age 23. In other words, for individuals who have likely completed major educational investments, our results suggest that financial opportunities play only a minor role in altering inequality. Second, we find that the option to invest in high-return, high-risk assets meaningfully increases the importance of initial inequality, whereas the ability to borrow lowers the importance of initial inequality.

In his infl uential 1998 study, David S. Reher discusses historical differences between countries with strong and weak family ties. He focuses on the “Western World”, comparing Italy and the Iberian Peninsula with Scandinavia, the British Isles, the Low Countries, Germany and Austria, together with North America. In this paper, we explore whether Romania, in Eastern Europe, can be characterised as having a strong family system, given the increasingly important role family has played for individual well-being following the end of the socialist regime. We observe a number of similarities between Romania and Southern European countries in terms of behaviours associated with “strong family ties”, opinions on family care and mutual intergenerational support. Differences can be explained in light of Romania’s economic and housing crisis. Overall, it is likely that the importance of family ties in Romania increased after the end of the socialist regime.

The history of Mexican immigration to the United States is best characterized as the movement of unskilled, manual laborers pushed northward mostly by poverty and unemployment and pulled into American labor markets with higher wages. Historically, most Mexicans have been economic immigrants seeking to improve their lives. In moments of civil strife, such as the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917) and the Cristero Revolt (1926–1929), many fled to the United States to escape religious and political persecution. Others, chafing under the weight of conservative, patriarchal, tradition-bound, rural agrarian societies, have migrated seeking modern values and greater personal liberties. Since the last quarter of the 19th century, due to increasing numeric restrictions on the importation of immigrant workers from Europe, Asia, and Africa, American employers have turned to Mexico to recruit cheap, unskilled labor. Before 1942, Mexico minimally regulated emigration. While attentive to the safety and well-being of its émigrés, the Mexican government deemed out-migration a depletion of the country’s human capital. Monetary remittances helped compensate for this loss, contributing perhaps as much as 10 percent of the country’s yearly gross national product, vastly improving national life, particularly when emigrants returned with skills and consumer goods, seeking investment opportunities for their accumulated cash. Since the 1980s, single Mexican women have become a significant component of this migration, representing 40 percent of the total immigrant flow, employed mostly as service workers, domestics, and nannies, and less so . . .

Learning at work is usually seen as beneficial for the professional and personal lives of workers. In this article, we propose that learnings relationship to worker well-being may be more complicated. We posit that learning can become a burden (instead of always being a benefit) in occupations that are learning intensive and tightly associated with the postindustrial economy. Results of analyses using data from the General Social Survey suggest that learning lessens workfamily conflict by increasing job satisfaction, but at the same time, learning makes workfamily conflict worse by leading people to work longer hours and exacerbating work-related stress.

Chapter 1: Couples in Turkey exhibit son preference through son-biased differential stopping behavior that does not cause a sex ratio imbalance in the population. Demand for sons leads to lower ratios of boys to girls in larger families but higher ratios in smaller families. Girls are born earlier than their male siblings, and son-biased fertility behavior is persistent in response to decline in fertility over time and across households with parents from different backgrounds. Parents use contraceptive methods to halt fertility following a male birth. The sibling sex composition is associated with gender disparities in health. Among third- or later-born children, female infant mortality is 1.5 percentage points lower if the previous sibling is male. The female survival advantage, however, disappears if the previous sibling is female. Having an older female sibling shifts the gender gap in infant mortality rate by 2 percentage points in favor of males. The improvement in infant mortality is strongest in favor of males who do not have an older male sibling.

Recent initiatives that overstate health insurance coverage for well-being conflict with the recognized antagonistic facts identified by the determinants of health that identify health care as an intermediate factor. By using a network of controlled interdependences among multiple social resources including health insurance, which we reconstructed from survey data of the U.S. and Bayesian networks structure learning algorithms, we examined why health insurance through coverage, which in most countries is the access gate to health care, is just an intermediate factor of well-being. We used social network analysis methods to explore the complex relationships involved at general, specific and particular levels of the model. All levels provide evidence that the intermediate role of health insurance relies in a strong relationship to income and reproduces its unfair distribution. Some signals about the most efficient type of health coverage emerged in our analyses.

Despite the introduction of multiple factors, multidimensional approaches cannot represent the complexity of the objective determinants of well-being (ODW). This paper proposes an alternative OWD model that adds a systemic approach, by using Bayesian networks algorithms to discover a directed two level network of variables nested in subnetworks of determinants. The network was inferred by using subsamples of the 2013 version of the American Community Survey. Network analysis methods applied to the model provided new insights concerning single ODW relevance and the roles that are useful to focus selective welfare interventions; they also offered a big picture that is fundamental to reason about the unpremeditated universal character of the selective US welfare policies.

Analyzing microdata covering more than 30 million U.S. households, I document that families with a financially sophisticated husband are more likely to participate in the stock market than those with a wife of equal financial sophistication. This pattern is not driven by gender differences in risk preference or selection effects, but can be explained by gender norms. The baseline effect is attenuated among individuals brought up by working mothers, but becomes stronger among descendants of pre-industrial societies in which women specialized in activities within the home and households with a husband born and raised in a southern state. In a controlled experiment, I show that gender identity has a causal impact by constraining womens influence over intra-household financial decision making. These findings suggest that gender identity norms can have real consequences for household financial well-being.

Parents differential treatment is a common family dynamic that has been linked to youths well-being in childhood and adolescence in European American families. Much less is known, however, about this family process in other ethnic groups. The authors examined the longitudinal associations between parents differential treatment (PDT) and both depressive symptoms and risky behaviors of Mexican-origin sibling pairs from early adolescence through young adulthood. They also tested the moderating roles of cultural orientations as well as youth age, gender and sibling dyad gender constellation in these associations. Participants were mothers, fathers, and 2 siblings from 246 Mexican-origin families who participated in individual home interviews on 3 occasions over 8 years. Multilevel models revealed that, controlling for dyadic parentchild relationship qualities (i.e., absolute levels of warmth and conflict), adolescents who had less favorable treatment by mothers relative to their sibling reported more depressive symptoms and risky behavior, on average. Findings for fathers PDT emerged at the within-person level indicating that, on occasions when adolescents experienced less favorable treatment by fathers than usual, they reported more depressive symptoms and risky behavior. However, some of these effects were moderated by youth age and cultural socialization. For example, adolescents who experienced relatively less paternal warmth than their siblings also reported poorer adjustment, but this effect did not emerge for young adults; such an effect also was significant for unfavored youth with stronger but not weaker cultural orientations.

Family structure in the United States has shifted substantially over the last three decades, yet the causes and implications of these changes for the well-being of family members remains unclear. This paper exploits task-based shifts in demand as an exogenous shock to sex-specific wages to demonstrate the role of the relative female to male wage in the family and labor market outcomes of women. I show that increases in the relative wage lead to a decline in the likelihood of marriage for those on the margin of a first marriage, and present suggestive evidence that these effects are concentrated among less-desirable matches. A higher relative wage also causes women to increase their hours of work, reduce their dependence on a male earner, and increase the likelihood of taking guardianship over their children. These findings indicate that improvements in the relative wage have facilitated womens independence by reducing the monetary incentive for marriage, and can account for 20% of the decline in marriage between 1980 and 2010.