Low-wage occupations are a common entry point into the labour market, but opportunities to move beyond them may vary substantially. This study examines long-term patterns of occupational upward mobility from low-wage labour-market entry across industries. Using Swedish full-population register data, the analysis follows all individuals aged 18–25 who entered the labour market in 2003 in a low-wage occupation and traces their occupational trajectories over 18 years. Event-history models reveal substantial and persistent differences across industries. Workers in manufacturing and construction transition faster and more frequently, whereas those in hospitality, cleaning, and personal services transition more slowly. In some of these industries, transitions take more than twice as long as among comparable workers in manufacturing, and a sizeable share do not experience upward mobility within the observation period. As low-wage employment becomes increasingly concentrated in service industries, these differences may reinforce existing inequalities, particularly because women and immigrants are disproportionately represented in several of the industries characterised by slower mobility.
The United States has experienced a marked rise across multiple forms of punishment including incarceration, probation, and monetary sanctions during the era of mass incarceration. However, studies examining the impacts of punishment on recidivism have a) primarily focused on the effects of incarceration and b) treated each axis of punishment as a separate, isolated factor in contrast to how they are experienced as a package of punishment. This study leverages a natural experiment using the quasi-random assignment of judges within Minnesota Judicial Districts and estimates the causal impacts of incarceration, probation, and monetary sanctions on recidivism while also examining how each punishment mode may condition the impact of the other. Findings indicate that the relationship between punishment and subsequent crime is weak overall, but the packaging of probation and LFOs together is criminogenic. Further, the criminogenic effects of probation are diminished among cases that carry lengthier incarceration sentences. These findings suggest that the impacts of punishment should be studied as they are experienced – as a mutually-constitutive package of confinement, surveillance, and financial costs.
This article examines how intra-household resources and extra-household organisational contexts jointly shape fathers' parental leave trajectories under a gender-neutral individual entitlement. Using administrative social security register data (IGSS) from Luxembourg, we analyse first-time, parental leave-eligible heterosexual couples with one child born between 2009 and 2012, conceptualising parental leave as a two-stage process: (1) fathers' initiation (timing) and (2) couples' joint allocation of leave duration. We estimate Kaplan-Meier curves and parametric survival models for initiation and multinomial logistic regressions for joint leave-taking strategies.We find that fathers generally take parental leave relatively late, with the first months after childbirth remaining predominantly a maternal territory. Descriptive results show that fathers in couples with greater economic resources tend to start leave later, with initiation timing strongly patterned by workplace context, including workforce composition in both fathers' and mothers' workplaces. Fathers' earnings play a stronger role in determining how leave is allocated between parents, suggesting that the financial costs of leave matter more for leave duration. At the same time, workplace conditions, particularly whether fathers work in female-dominated workplaces, remain important for both when fathers take leave and how much they take it.Overall, the findings show that having a legal right to parental leave does not automatically lead to equal use of that leave. Fathers' leave-taking is shaped by both workplace norms and the practical constraints couples face when making decisions together. Policies that aim to increase more symmetrical allocation of leave among parents should therefore focus not only on leave entitlements and payment levels but also on creating workplace environments that support and normalise taking leave.
Value change is often attributed to generational replacement. Modernization theory has popularized the idea that as younger generations expand in the population, their postmaterial emancipative values come to dominate, while more conservative values fade away with older generations. Yet this cohort-centered view discounts that contemporaneous period effects can shift the values of all cohorts simultaneously. Using data on postmaterial emancipative values from the Integrated Values Survey (1981–2022), covering 122,205 respondents in 13 countries, we conduct a bounding age–period–cohort analysis. The analysis leverages modernization theory's own assumption that age effects on emancipative values are not positive. Under this constraint, period effects are positive in seven countries and exceed cohort effects in four throughout the admissible age-effect range. In the remaining nine countries, cohort effects exceed period effects under zero or sufficiently weak negative age effects. Assuming more negative age effects mechanically strengthens period effects while weakening cohort effects. These results challenge cohort replacement as a sufficient general account of long-term value modernization, showing that the relative importance of period and cohort effects depends on the country and assumptions about aging.
Low-income families disproportionately experience higher neighborhood crime. When choosing where to live, families report neighborhood safety as a top priority. Yet, the role (if any) that income plays in promoting moves to safer neighborhoods remains unclear. In our paper, we leverage a social experiment of a randomized trial of unconditional cash transfers to understand whether the effect of increased net income led mothers to move to safer neighborhoods. We utilize the Baby's First Years randomized trial of ∼1000 families to test whether unconditional cash transfers promote residential mobility among low-income families to safer neighborhoods characterized by lower violent and/or property crime. We also test for heterogeneity by the number of children in the household. Our intent-to-treat results show no difference in families' neighborhood crime rates, by cash transfer group, over the four-year test period for any crime outcome. However, among mothers with at least two children at enrollment, the high-cash gift group moved to neighborhoods with lower crime rates compared to the low-cash gift group. Receipt of a modest, monthly, unconditional cash transfer corresponds with subsequent moves to a safer neighborhood for a subset of low-income families with newborns.
