Daniele Vignoli

The educational gradient in marital disruption: a meta-analysis of European research findings.

A large number of empirical studies have investigated the effects of womens education on union dissolution in Europe, but results have varied substantially. This paper seeks to assess the relationship between educational attainment and the incidence of marital disruption by systematizing the existing empirical evidence. A quantitative literature review (a meta-analysis) was conducted to investigate the temporal change in the relationship, net of inter-study differences. The results point to a weakening of the positive educational gradient in marital disruption over time and even to a reversal in the direction of this gradient in some countries. The findings also show that the change in the educational gradient can be linked to an increase in access to divorce. Finally, the results suggest that womens empowerment has played an important role in changing the educational gradient, while the liberalization of divorce laws has not.

Determinants of Contraceptive Use in Egypt: A Multilevel Approach

The increasing use of family planning methods seems to be the intermediate determinant which mostly influences the fertility decline in developing countries, and in particular in those countries which are in an advanced phase of demographic transition such as Egypt. Moreover large countries, like Egypt, are characterized by very different geographical realities and even by strong regional heterogeneities. The aim of this study is the analysis of the determinants of contraceptive use in Egypt, with particular reference to the differentials due to the socio-economic context and to the area of residence. To estimate each individual and regional factors’ effect on contraceptive use, a logistic two-level random intercept model is fitted to EDHS 2000 data; the use of a multilevel analysis is suggested by the two-level data structure: the first level units are the women, the second level units are their regions of residence.

Work–Family Conflict Moderates the Relationship Between Childbearing and Subjective Well-Being

Many empirical studies find that parents are not as happy as non-parents or that parenthood exerts a negative effect on subjective well-being (SWB). We add to these findings by arguing that there is a key moderating factor that has been overlooked in previous research, i.e. the level of work–family conflict. We hypothesize that the birth of a child means an increase in the level of work–family tension, which may be substantial for some parents and relatively weak for others. To outline such an approach, we estimate fixed-effects models using panel data from the Household, Income and Labor Dynamics in Australia survey. We find that childbearing negatively affects SWB only when parents, mothers in particular, face a substantial work–family conflict, providing thus support for our hypothesis.

Partners' educational pairings and fertility across Europe

We provide new evidence on the education-fertility relationship by using EU-SILC panel data on 24 European countries to investigate how couples’ educational pairings predict their childbearing behavior. We focus on differences in first-, second-, and third-birth rates among couples with varying combinations of partners’ education. Our results show important differences in how education relates to parity progressions depending on the education of the partner. First, highly educated homogamous couples show a distinct childbearing behavior in most country clusters. They tend to postpone the first birth most and display the highest second- and third-birth rates. Second, contrary to what may be expected based on the “new home economics” approach, hypergamous couples with a highly educated male and a lower-educated female partner display among the lowest second-birth transitions. Our findings underscore the relevance of interacting both partners’ education for a better understanding of the education-fertility relationship.

Employed Women and Marital Union Stability: It Helps When Men Help:

A new strand of studies has called into question standard microeconomic predictions of a positive association between women’s economic independence and marital union dissolution. We investigate whether and how the gender division of labor channels the impact of women’s employment on marital union disruption, utilizing data on heterosexual couples from the 2003 and 2007 waves of the Italian nationally representative “Family and Social Subject” survey (N = 2,871) and applying techniques of mediation analysis. We suggest that women’s employment does not have a negative effect per se on union stability, and that women’s paid work becomes detrimental to the stability of the union only if the men’s contribution to unpaid work is limited.

Childbearing Behaviours of Employed Women in Italy and Poland

As a result of low fertility and ageing populations, reconciling work and family has become a prominent topic in demographic research. Numerous macro-level studies on this topic have found that the cross-country correlation between total fertility and women’s labour force participation has changed from negative to positive in Western European economies (Ahn and Mira, 2002; Engelhardt and Prskawetz, 2004; Kogel, 2004). The micro-level relationship between the two roles has mostly been found to be negative, although its magnitude varies depending on the country studied (Matysiak and Vignoli, 2008). The economic theory of fertility and women’s labour supply explains this phenomenon by the cross-country differences in the opportunity costs of childbearing, such as the income lost during the non-participation period, but also future earnings foregone due to non-accumulation and depreciation of human capital (Walker, 1995; Gustafsson, 2001). These costs are larger in countries with rigid labour markets and a pronounced insider-outsider divide, and those that lack safety nets and family policies oriented towards supporting a successful reconciliation of motherhood and paid work (Esping-Andersen, 1999).

Methods for Reconciling the Micro and the Macro in Family Demography Research: A Systematisation

In the second half of the twentieth century, the scientific study of population changed its paradigm from the macro to the micro, so that attention focused mainly on individuals as the agents of demographic action. However, for accurate handling of all the complexities of human behaviours, the interactions between individuals and the context they belong to cannot be ignored. Therefore, in order to explain (or, at least, to understand) contemporary fertility and family dynamics, the gap between the micro and the macro should be bridged. In this contribution, we highlight two possible directions for bridging the gap: (1) integrating life-course analyses with the study of contextual characteristics, which is made possible by the emergence of the theory and tools of multi-level modelling; and (2) bringing the micro-level findings back to macro outcomes via meta-analytic techniques and agent-based computational models.

Home bitter home? Gender, living arrangements, and the exclusion from homeownership among older Europeans

Homeownership is the most important asset among the elderly in Europe, but very little is known about gender and living arrangement differences in this domain. This paper aims at exploring patterns of exclusion from homeownership among middle-aged and older Europeans from a gender perspective, and with a special focus on their household composition. The analysis is based on the fourth wave of the “Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe” and includes a sub-sample of about 56,000 individuals aged 50 or over, living in 16 European countries. We estimated a set of multinomial logit models to examine the probability of being either tenant or rent-free occupiers versus homeowners. Our findings show that women are generally more likely to be excluded from homeownership than men. Nevertheless, a closer look suggests that the gender gap in homeownership is essentially generated by compositional differences between men and women, with the most relevant factor being household type. Older women are almost as twice as likely as men to live alone, which is associated—other things being equal—with a particular low likelihood to be homeowners virtually in every European country.

Migrant and native interaction : labor market and marriage market

The more we study the migration phenomenon the more we understand how deep rooted in its understanding is the sentence: “countries of destination thought they had let in workers and they discovered instead that they had let in human beings*”. Much attention is paid to the economic effects of migrants in countries of destination. But relatively little attention is paid to extremely important socio-political and demographic effects. Migration and integration policies are, also, evaluated in economic terms: do migrants increase welfare costs; do they displace native workers; do they favor economic growth etc. European researchers have neglected many key aspects of family-related migration, lagging behind, in this respect, North American and Latin American research (e.g., Boyle 2002; Falicov 2007; Glick 2010). With this policy brief, we would like to point out the multiple effects that foreign workers can have in non-economic areas. In particular, we would like to point out that a policy designed to take care, for instance, of the elderly through foreign labor can have externalities on the marriage market. Hence, a correct evaluation of a policy needs to be more comprehensive and to look at all the implications of a given decision.