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.
Maternal involvement with the criminal legal system (CLS) often leads to changes in children's living arrangements, reorganizing family roles, authority and daily routines. Drawing on family systems theory, we argue that these living arrangements function as emergent responses in the context of adversity that can either be protective or disruptive for children's educational outcomes. Using longitudinal administrative data from the Wisconsin Administrative Data Core (WADC), we follow a cohort of 129,139 children from Wisconsin born in 2000-2002 across grades 3-11. We examine how living arrangements (with biological parents, grandparents, other relatives, or nonbiological family) shape educational outcomes (reading and math test scores; attendance rates) across varying levels of early-life maternal CLS involvement (none, CLS contact without incarceration, incarceration). Specifically, we leverage hybrid mixed effects models that decompose associations into within- and between-child components. Attendance rates were higher during years children lived with grandparents, other relatives, or nonbiological family than during years with a biological parent, across all CLS groups and robustness checks. Test-score associations were more modest, heterogeneous, and CLS-dependent. Overall, alternative living arrangements were associated with small increases in test scores in the context of prior maternal incarceration but were associated with decreased test scores among children with no maternal CLS involvement. Supplemental analyses highlight that the duration spent in alternative living arrangements and institutional support may be more important correlates of children's educational outcomes than caregiver type.
While the impact of family migration on paid work is well-documented, its potential influence on housework remains largely unknown. This study examines the effect of couple migration on the division of housework in China, focusing on changes in housework hours for both female and male partners. Using panel data from the 2014 and 2016 waves of the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), we examine whether and how housework hours change following couple migration, and whether these changes correspond with shifts in employment conditions and family structure. Drawing on three theoretical perspectives, our analysis identifies couple migration as a significant life-course transition influencing domestic labour patterns. Results reveal only an increase, around 2 h per week, in women's housework time post-migration, even after accounting for shifts in employment status, working hours, and family structures. This gendered increase may reflect persistent traditional gender views and the social isolation experienced by migrant families, who often face challenges integrating into local communities. Our findings contribute to the literature on gender inequality by highlighting how couple migration can reinforce traditional gender roles, especially under conditions of limited social support. The study offers novel insights into the mechanisms underlying shifts in housework division during migration, utilising high-quality longitudinal data to capture actual behavioural changes among Chinese couples.
