Increasing expenditures on home- and community-based services: Do home care workers benefit?

Objective: To examine the association of Medicaid home- and community-based services (HCBS) expenditures on the home care workforce.

Data Sources/study Setting: We use two national, secondary data sources from 2008 to 2019: state-level Medicaid HCBS expenditures and the American Community Survey, in which we identify direct care workers in the home (i.e.

Work and Family Disadvantage: Determinants of Gender Gaps in Paid Work During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

This article provides a comprehensive analysis of the increase in gender inequality in paid work during the pandemic to unpack the relative relevance of labor market and work-family conflict processes. Using panel data from the United States Current Population Survey, we examine four mechanisms in an integrated analysis that explicitly includes single-parent households and assesses the moderating role of women's economic position relative to their partners. The results indicate that increases in gender inequality during the pandemic were heavily concentrated in households with children but also partly connected to gender differences in prepandemic labor market positions and to the higher prevalence of women in lower earner position relative to their partners.

CHANGE AND VARIATION IN U.S. COUPLES' EARNINGS EQUALITY FOLLOWING PARENTHOOD.

In the context of broad increases in gender equality and growing socioeconomic disparities along multiple dimensions of family life, we examine changes in within-family earnings equality following parenthood and the extent to which they have played out differently by education. Our analysis relies on links between rich surveys and administrative tax records that provide high quality earnings data for husbands and wives spanning two years before and up to 10 years following first births from the 1980s to the 2000s in the United States (Survey of Income and Program Participation Synthetic Beta files; =21,300 couples and 194,100 couple-years). Accounting for time-invariant couple characteristics and year and age fixed effects, we find that wives' share of total couple earnings declines substantially after parenthood and remains lower over the observation window.

Regulated earnings security: the relationship between employment protection and unemployment scarring over the Great Recession.

The Great Recession raised the concern that employment protective institutions that are effective during macroeconomic stability might become counterproductive under growing macroeconomic volatility. We study this question by examining the relationship between employment protection legislation (EPL) and unemployment scars on earnings in 21 countries during the period surrounding the Great Recession. We use harmonized work history data for 21 countries from 2004 to 2014 and combine propensity score matching and multilevel-regression to estimate how earnings losses due to unemployment vary with the strength of labor market regulation and over changing macroeconomic conditions.

Women's employment and fertility in a global perspective (1960-2015).

Background: Scant research explores the association between women's employment and fertility on a truly global scale due to limited cross-national comparative standardized information across contexts.

Methods: This paper compiles a unique dataset that combines nationally representative country-level data on women's wage employment from the International Labor Organization with fertility and reproductive health measures from the United Nations and additional information from UNESCO, OECD, and the World Bank. This dataset is used to explore the linear association between women's employment and fertility/reproductive health around the world between 1960 and 2015.

Marriage and Masculinity: Male-Breadwinner Culture, Unemployment, and Separation Risk in 29 Countries.

Scholars argue that gender culture, understood as a set of beliefs, norms, and social expectations defining masculinities and femininities, plays an important role in shaping when romantic relationships end. However, the relevance of gender culture is often underappreciated, in part because its empirical identification remains elusive. This study leverages cross-country variation in gender norms to test the hypothesis that gender culture conditions which heterosexual romantic relationships end and when.

Changes in Couples' Earnings Following Parenthood and Trends in Family Earnings Inequality.

The growing economic similarity of spouses has contributed to rising income inequality across households. Explanations have typically centered on assortative mating, but recent work has argued that changes in women's employment and spouses' division of paid work have played a more important role. We expand this work to consider the critical turning point of parenthood in shaping couples' division of employment and earnings.

Trends in Economic Homogamy: Changes in Assortative Mating or the Division of Labor in Marriage?

The growing economic resemblance of spouses has contributed to rising inequality by increasing the number of couples in which there are two high- or two low-earning partners. The dominant explanation for this trend is increased assortative mating. Previous research has primarily relied on cross-sectional data and thus has been unable to disentangle changes in assortative mating from changes in the division of spouses' paid labor-a potentially key mechanism given the dramatic rise in wives' labor supply.

Trends in Relative Earnings and Marital Dissolution: Are Wives Who Outearn Their Husbands Still More Likely to Divorce?

As women's labor-force participation and earnings have grown, so has the likelihood that wives outearn their husbands. A common concern is that these couples may be at heightened risk of divorce. Yet with the rise of egalitarian marriage, wives' relative earnings may be more weakly associated with divorce than in the past.

Migration, Household Tasks, and Gender: Evidence from the Republic of Georgia.

We examine whether migration affects the gender division of household tasks and participation in leisure within origin-country households using survey data from the Republic of Georgia. Our theoretical framework identifies two sets of mechanisms whereby migration might influence gender differences in home activities: migrant experience effects and migrant absence effects. We test for both types of effects on the probability that men and women perform gender atypical household tasks and engage in leisure activities by comparing households with and without currently absent and return migrants using probit regressions.