Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch ge... more Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes. You are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence.
Aggregate data shows an inverse relationship between female employment and income inequality. Thi... more Aggregate data shows an inverse relationship between female employment and income inequality. This paper investigates this relationship using micro-data for seventeen OECD countries. In all countries, female earnings exert an equalising force on the distribution of income in spite of large employment gaps between high and low educated women. There are marked similarities across countries; even in Nordic countries where employment rates are high female earnings comprise a small proportion of the family budget and single women, employed or not, are overrepresented in the bottom of the income distribution. The US is the one country that stands out, with greater earnings equality among couples and more single women households making it into the top quintile. For all countries, raising female employment and reducing employment inequality between women would have a substantial impact on reducing household income inequality, and a far larger impact than reducing the gender pay gap.
This paper explores the relationship between mother's participation in paid employment and depres... more This paper explores the relationship between mother's participation in paid employment and depression in the UK. It uses 18-waves of data from the British Household Panel Survey and the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) to investigate this relationship at two points in time, 1993/98 and 2003/08. The findings show that maternal employment is associated with lower levels of mental distress for both married and single mothers. This relationship has become stronger over time for partnered mothers. For single mothers the association of work with a reduced incidence of depression is a new phenomenon only observed in the later period. Two potential reasons for these changes over time are investigated, those resulting from (i) changes in selection into employment and (ii) changes in occupation.
observed improvements in the mental health of working lone mothers. We conclude that under a supp... more observed improvements in the mental health of working lone mothers. We conclude that under a supportive policy environment employment can lead to improvements in lone mothers' mental health but that these gains are not automatic, as was the case in the 1990s when lone mothers saw no significant mental health benefits to work.
In this paper, we examine the cost of job loss to household incomes, and the extent to which init... more In this paper, we examine the cost of job loss to household incomes, and the extent to which initial losses is compensated through the market, within the household and by the social security programmes. We use high quality survey and admin data from Denmark, Finland, Germany and the UK for the period of 1990-2018 and monitor incomes after job loss using an event study design. Our findings reveal significant, relatively persistent and long-term penalties on household incomes (around 9-13% of previous earnings) that are only higher in the UK in the short-term. Market appears to be the primary mechanism of compensation in all countries, while the relative importance of household and state compensations vary across countries. State compensation plays a crucial role in mitigating immediate income losses, while market compensation becomes more important over time. Household compensation mainly acts as a substitute for market and state compensation.
This study examines how earnings penalties to motherhood combine with the cost of partner absence... more This study examines how earnings penalties to motherhood combine with the cost of partner absence to affect single mothers’ economic well-being. Using 25-years of longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) from 1990 to 2015 and fixed-effect models with individual-specific slopes I find that, after adjusting for needs, the transition to parenthood is as strongly linked to reduced income as partner absence. Comparing how these different routes to single motherhood affect economic outcomes, I show that previously married mothers face larger income penalties than those who were single when their first child was born because they see larger declines in their own earnings following childbirth. The results illustrate how marriage and parenthood, alongside partner absence, shape the economic prospects of single mother families, and highlight the importance of reducing gender inequalities in the labor market for improving single mothers’ economic well-being.
The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in the greatest disruption to children’s schooling in generations.... more The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in the greatest disruption to children’s schooling in generations. This study analyses primary school children’s emotional engagement with remote schooling during the Spring 2020 lockdown in the Republic of Ireland, which involved one of the longest school closures among rich countries at the time. It investigates whether children’s engagement with their remote schooling varied by personal and family characteristics, using data from the Children’s School Lives (CSL) surveys. CSL is a nationally representative study of primary schools in Ireland, which collected information from children aged 8–9 years in May – August 2019 and in May – July 2020. Linear regression estimates with school fixed effects are based on the analytic sample of nearly 400 children (from across 71 schools) who took part in both waves and have complete data on all the key variables. Emotional engagement with schooling is measured using child-reported items on satisfaction with scho...
Recent analysis has suggested that poverty rates, and their variation across rich countries, is d... more Recent analysis has suggested that poverty rates, and their variation across rich countries, is driven much less by the prevalence of certain risks than by the poverty penalty attached to the risks. Focusing on single motherhood as a poverty risk, it is claimed the penalty attached to it is specific to the United States. This claim, we show, relies on models that condition on the major mechanisms through which poverty risks are heightened: the risk of non-employment, and of having only a single earner, in the household. Removing these conditions, we find that the poverty penalties associated with single motherhood accounts to a similar degree to the prevalences of single motherhood for variation in poverty rates in rich countries. The penalty averages 16% and is significant in 27 out of 28 countries. At nearly 26%, the penalty in the United States is comparatively high, but not exceptionally so, with 9 out of 28 countries having penalties over 20%. Any comparative analysis of poverty or inequality, we argue, must recognize the joint role of work, welfare and family institutions. In all but the Scandinavian nations, these institutions remain gendered.
A growing body of research links the rise in lone parent families to growing income inequality an... more A growing body of research links the rise in lone parent families to growing income inequality and poverty ). These studies suggest that changing family structures and in particular the rise in lone parent families accounted for up to two-fifths of the rise in US family income inequality (for a review see . However, as these studies use cross-sectional data they are not able to tell how well-off lone parent families would have been had they not become lone parents: those that become lone parents have been poor even if they were had not had children, or if they had remained living with a partner. In this chapter we address the question: to what extent is becoming a lone parent associated with worse economic outcomes for women? We do so by tracking women over a long period of time to see how they are influenced by (i) transitions to motherhood and (ii) partnership status. As authors such as Esping-Andersen ( ) have noted this first transition, the transition to parenthood, and its influence on women's employment and earnings appears to have an important impact of lone parent's later outcomes. Yet while a great deal of previous research has examined the effect of motherhood on women's earnings and employment (e.g. Harkness and Waldfogel 2003) far fewer studies have looked at the subsequent influence that these losses have on lone mothers' economic outcomes. The economic consequences of partnership status and, of particular relevance here, partnership dissolution, have been much more widely studied. These studies, with few exceptions, find that women, and in particular women with children, face substantial income losses as a result of partnership breakdown . While partnership breakdown and divorce are important routes into lone parenthood, a large share of those that experience lone motherhood become lone parents because they give birth to a child without co-residing with a partner. These "birth
This paper explores the relationship between mother’s participation in paid employment and depres... more This paper explores the relationship between mother’s participation in paid employment and depression in the UK. It uses 18-waves of data from the British Household Panel Survey and the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) to investigate this relationship at two points in time, 1993/98 and 2003/08. The findings show that maternal employment is associated with lower levels of mental distress for both married and single mothers. This relationship has become stronger over time for partnered mothers. For single mothers the association of work with a reduced incidence of depression is a new phenomenon only observed in the later period. Two potential reasons for these changes over time are investigated, those resulting from (i) changes in selection into employment and (ii) changes in occupation.
To cut the deficit, the UK government has increasingly turned to cuts in working age welfare. To ... more To cut the deficit, the UK government has increasingly turned to cuts in working age welfare. To date, it has operated a ‘salami slicing’ approach: cutting or capping out of work benefit entitlements, in-work tax credits and Child Benefit. This has been combined with dis-entitling some groups from benefits through tougher testing or changing the rules of entitlement, for example limiting access to some disability benefits to a year where the person has some other income sources and removing Child Benefit for better off families with children.At the same time, those claiming out of work benefits face the threat of more severe sanctions where they fail to comply with stringent job search requirements. This Policy Brief, by two leading labour market and welfare reform researchers at the University of Bath (Professor Paul Gregg and Dr Susan Harkness), examines two of the latest developments in Coalition policy that were announced in the 2013 Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR): extendin...
The idea that ‘work is good for you’ has long been championed by politicians and policy makers. R... more The idea that ‘work is good for you’ has long been championed by politicians and policy makers. Recent research by the University of Bath suggests that, for lone mothers, paid work that enables them to balance work and childcare responsibilities really does improve their mental well-being. This is particularly where there is flexibility over working hours and no pressure to work more hours than desired. The study carried out by Dr Susan Harkness, in collaboration with Gingerbread (a leading charity supporting single parent families) and funded by the Nuffield Foundation, has shown that being in paid employment is a key factor explaining the fall in lone mother’s rates of depression seen in the last decade. This improvement was found only among working lone mothers; for those not in work, mental well-being deteriorated over the same period. This contrasts with the mid-1990s, when work and positive mental health showed little association, with those both in and out of work being at hi...
observed improvements in the mental health of working lone mothers. We conclude that under a supp... more observed improvements in the mental health of working lone mothers. We conclude that under a supportive policy environment employment can lead to improvements in lone mothers' mental health but that these gains are not automatic, as was the case in the 1990s when lone mothers saw no significant mental health benefits to work.
Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch ge... more Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes. You are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence.
Aggregate data shows an inverse relationship between female employment and income inequality. Thi... more Aggregate data shows an inverse relationship between female employment and income inequality. This paper investigates this relationship using micro-data for seventeen OECD countries. In all countries, female earnings exert an equalising force on the distribution of income in spite of large employment gaps between high and low educated women. There are marked similarities across countries; even in Nordic countries where employment rates are high female earnings comprise a small proportion of the family budget and single women, employed or not, are overrepresented in the bottom of the income distribution. The US is the one country that stands out, with greater earnings equality among couples and more single women households making it into the top quintile. For all countries, raising female employment and reducing employment inequality between women would have a substantial impact on reducing household income inequality, and a far larger impact than reducing the gender pay gap.
This paper explores the relationship between mother's participation in paid employment and depres... more This paper explores the relationship between mother's participation in paid employment and depression in the UK. It uses 18-waves of data from the British Household Panel Survey and the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) to investigate this relationship at two points in time, 1993/98 and 2003/08. The findings show that maternal employment is associated with lower levels of mental distress for both married and single mothers. This relationship has become stronger over time for partnered mothers. For single mothers the association of work with a reduced incidence of depression is a new phenomenon only observed in the later period. Two potential reasons for these changes over time are investigated, those resulting from (i) changes in selection into employment and (ii) changes in occupation.
observed improvements in the mental health of working lone mothers. We conclude that under a supp... more observed improvements in the mental health of working lone mothers. We conclude that under a supportive policy environment employment can lead to improvements in lone mothers' mental health but that these gains are not automatic, as was the case in the 1990s when lone mothers saw no significant mental health benefits to work.
In this paper, we examine the cost of job loss to household incomes, and the extent to which init... more In this paper, we examine the cost of job loss to household incomes, and the extent to which initial losses is compensated through the market, within the household and by the social security programmes. We use high quality survey and admin data from Denmark, Finland, Germany and the UK for the period of 1990-2018 and monitor incomes after job loss using an event study design. Our findings reveal significant, relatively persistent and long-term penalties on household incomes (around 9-13% of previous earnings) that are only higher in the UK in the short-term. Market appears to be the primary mechanism of compensation in all countries, while the relative importance of household and state compensations vary across countries. State compensation plays a crucial role in mitigating immediate income losses, while market compensation becomes more important over time. Household compensation mainly acts as a substitute for market and state compensation.
This study examines how earnings penalties to motherhood combine with the cost of partner absence... more This study examines how earnings penalties to motherhood combine with the cost of partner absence to affect single mothers’ economic well-being. Using 25-years of longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) from 1990 to 2015 and fixed-effect models with individual-specific slopes I find that, after adjusting for needs, the transition to parenthood is as strongly linked to reduced income as partner absence. Comparing how these different routes to single motherhood affect economic outcomes, I show that previously married mothers face larger income penalties than those who were single when their first child was born because they see larger declines in their own earnings following childbirth. The results illustrate how marriage and parenthood, alongside partner absence, shape the economic prospects of single mother families, and highlight the importance of reducing gender inequalities in the labor market for improving single mothers’ economic well-being.
The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in the greatest disruption to children’s schooling in generations.... more The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in the greatest disruption to children’s schooling in generations. This study analyses primary school children’s emotional engagement with remote schooling during the Spring 2020 lockdown in the Republic of Ireland, which involved one of the longest school closures among rich countries at the time. It investigates whether children’s engagement with their remote schooling varied by personal and family characteristics, using data from the Children’s School Lives (CSL) surveys. CSL is a nationally representative study of primary schools in Ireland, which collected information from children aged 8–9 years in May – August 2019 and in May – July 2020. Linear regression estimates with school fixed effects are based on the analytic sample of nearly 400 children (from across 71 schools) who took part in both waves and have complete data on all the key variables. Emotional engagement with schooling is measured using child-reported items on satisfaction with scho...
Recent analysis has suggested that poverty rates, and their variation across rich countries, is d... more Recent analysis has suggested that poverty rates, and their variation across rich countries, is driven much less by the prevalence of certain risks than by the poverty penalty attached to the risks. Focusing on single motherhood as a poverty risk, it is claimed the penalty attached to it is specific to the United States. This claim, we show, relies on models that condition on the major mechanisms through which poverty risks are heightened: the risk of non-employment, and of having only a single earner, in the household. Removing these conditions, we find that the poverty penalties associated with single motherhood accounts to a similar degree to the prevalences of single motherhood for variation in poverty rates in rich countries. The penalty averages 16% and is significant in 27 out of 28 countries. At nearly 26%, the penalty in the United States is comparatively high, but not exceptionally so, with 9 out of 28 countries having penalties over 20%. Any comparative analysis of poverty or inequality, we argue, must recognize the joint role of work, welfare and family institutions. In all but the Scandinavian nations, these institutions remain gendered.
A growing body of research links the rise in lone parent families to growing income inequality an... more A growing body of research links the rise in lone parent families to growing income inequality and poverty ). These studies suggest that changing family structures and in particular the rise in lone parent families accounted for up to two-fifths of the rise in US family income inequality (for a review see . However, as these studies use cross-sectional data they are not able to tell how well-off lone parent families would have been had they not become lone parents: those that become lone parents have been poor even if they were had not had children, or if they had remained living with a partner. In this chapter we address the question: to what extent is becoming a lone parent associated with worse economic outcomes for women? We do so by tracking women over a long period of time to see how they are influenced by (i) transitions to motherhood and (ii) partnership status. As authors such as Esping-Andersen ( ) have noted this first transition, the transition to parenthood, and its influence on women's employment and earnings appears to have an important impact of lone parent's later outcomes. Yet while a great deal of previous research has examined the effect of motherhood on women's earnings and employment (e.g. Harkness and Waldfogel 2003) far fewer studies have looked at the subsequent influence that these losses have on lone mothers' economic outcomes. The economic consequences of partnership status and, of particular relevance here, partnership dissolution, have been much more widely studied. These studies, with few exceptions, find that women, and in particular women with children, face substantial income losses as a result of partnership breakdown . While partnership breakdown and divorce are important routes into lone parenthood, a large share of those that experience lone motherhood become lone parents because they give birth to a child without co-residing with a partner. These "birth
This paper explores the relationship between mother’s participation in paid employment and depres... more This paper explores the relationship between mother’s participation in paid employment and depression in the UK. It uses 18-waves of data from the British Household Panel Survey and the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) to investigate this relationship at two points in time, 1993/98 and 2003/08. The findings show that maternal employment is associated with lower levels of mental distress for both married and single mothers. This relationship has become stronger over time for partnered mothers. For single mothers the association of work with a reduced incidence of depression is a new phenomenon only observed in the later period. Two potential reasons for these changes over time are investigated, those resulting from (i) changes in selection into employment and (ii) changes in occupation.
To cut the deficit, the UK government has increasingly turned to cuts in working age welfare. To ... more To cut the deficit, the UK government has increasingly turned to cuts in working age welfare. To date, it has operated a ‘salami slicing’ approach: cutting or capping out of work benefit entitlements, in-work tax credits and Child Benefit. This has been combined with dis-entitling some groups from benefits through tougher testing or changing the rules of entitlement, for example limiting access to some disability benefits to a year where the person has some other income sources and removing Child Benefit for better off families with children.At the same time, those claiming out of work benefits face the threat of more severe sanctions where they fail to comply with stringent job search requirements. This Policy Brief, by two leading labour market and welfare reform researchers at the University of Bath (Professor Paul Gregg and Dr Susan Harkness), examines two of the latest developments in Coalition policy that were announced in the 2013 Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR): extendin...
The idea that ‘work is good for you’ has long been championed by politicians and policy makers. R... more The idea that ‘work is good for you’ has long been championed by politicians and policy makers. Recent research by the University of Bath suggests that, for lone mothers, paid work that enables them to balance work and childcare responsibilities really does improve their mental well-being. This is particularly where there is flexibility over working hours and no pressure to work more hours than desired. The study carried out by Dr Susan Harkness, in collaboration with Gingerbread (a leading charity supporting single parent families) and funded by the Nuffield Foundation, has shown that being in paid employment is a key factor explaining the fall in lone mother’s rates of depression seen in the last decade. This improvement was found only among working lone mothers; for those not in work, mental well-being deteriorated over the same period. This contrasts with the mid-1990s, when work and positive mental health showed little association, with those both in and out of work being at hi...
observed improvements in the mental health of working lone mothers. We conclude that under a supp... more observed improvements in the mental health of working lone mothers. We conclude that under a supportive policy environment employment can lead to improvements in lone mothers' mental health but that these gains are not automatic, as was the case in the 1990s when lone mothers saw no significant mental health benefits to work.
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