Elizabeth Washbrook

The Timing of Mothers’ Employment After Childbirth.

According to data from a new nationally representative study of women who gave birth in 2001, the speed of a womans return to work after the birth of a child was influenced by many factors, including family structure, education, age, birth history, and race/ethnicity, but the strongest factor was whether or not the woman had been working prior to the birth.

Pre-school hyperactivity/attention problems and educational outcomes in adolescence: prospective longitudinal study.

BACKGROUND High levels of attentional and hyperactivity problems in school-aged children, even if subthreshold for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), are associated with academic under-achievement. Few large-scale, community-based studies have investigated the relationship between pre-school and adolescence. AIMS To investigate whether pre-school hyperactivity/inattention and conduct problems are independently associated with academic outcomes at age 16. METHOD Data from the prospective, population-based Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) were used. After adjusting for a broad range of confounder variables, the associations between parent-rated hyperactivity/inattention and conduct problems measured at age 3 and academic outcomes at age 16 (national General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) examination results) were investigated (n = 11 640). RESULTS Both early hyperactivity/inattention and conduct problems had negative effects on academic outcomes. In adjusted analyses, abnormal hyperactivity/inattention scores were associated with reductions of ten GCSE points in boys. Borderline and abnormal conduct problem scores were associated with reductions of 9-10 and 12-15 points respectively. CONCLUSIONS Pre-school hyperactivity/inattention and conduct problems carry risk of worse academic outcomes at 16.

The development of young children of immigrants in Australia, Canada, the United kingdom, and the United States.

In spite of important differences in some of the resources immigrant parents have to invest in their children, and in immigrant selection rules and settlement policies, there are significant similarities in the relative positions of 4- and 5-year-old children of immigrants in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Children of immigrants underperform their counterparts with native-born parents in vocabulary tests, particularly if a language other than the official language is spoken at home, but are not generally disadvantaged in nonverbal cognitive domains, nor are there notable behavioral differences. These findings suggest that the cross-country differences in cognitive outcomes during the teen years documented in the existing literature are much less evident during the early years.

Early years policy

In this paper, we analyze the role that early years policy might play in narrowing educational attainment gaps. We begin by examining gaps in school readiness between low-, middle-, and high-income children, drawing on data from new large and nationally representative birth cohort studies in the US and UK. We find that sizable income-related gaps in school readiness are present in both countries before children enter school and then decompose these gaps to identify the factors that account for the poorer scores of low-income children. We then consider what role early years policy could play in tackling these gaps, drawing on the best available evidence to identify promising programs.

Residential context, migration and fertility in a modern urban society ☆

This study examines fertility variation by residential context in Britain. While there is a large literature on fertility trends and determinants in industrialised countries, to date longitudinal research on spatial fertility variation has been restricted to the Nordic countries. We study fertility variation across regions of different sizes, and within urban regions by distinguishing between central cities and suburbs. We use vital statistics and longitudinal data and apply event history analysis. We investigate the extent to which the socio-economic characteristics of couples and selective migrations explain fertility variation between residential contexts, and the extent to which contextual factors potentially play a role. Our analysis shows that fertility levels decline as the size of an urban area increases; within urban regions suburbs have significantly higher fertility levels than city centres. Differences in fertility by residential context persist when we control for the effect of population composition and selective migrations.

Modeling Household Decisions Using Longitudinal Data from Household Panel Surveys, with Applications to Residential Mobility

Many events occurring to married or cohabiting individuals are the result of decisions made jointly by both partners. However, studies of life-course events usually take an individual or head-of-household perspective and so do not explicitly reflect the joint nature of these decisions. Household panel studies and population registers are a rich resource for the study of household events, but analyzing such data presents major analytical challenges. Models should ideally allow for the influence of both partners in a couple’s decision making and be flexible enough to handle the facts that individuals can change their partners and have periods when they are not in coresidential unions. In this article, the authors propose two types of multilevel random-effects models to address some of these issues: a “multiple-membership” model in which the outcome depends on a weighted combination of the random effects for each decision maker and a random-coefficients model that allows different random effects for individuals when they are single and partnered. All methods are discussed in terms of a binary household outcome before describing more general discrete-choice models for nominal outcomes. The proposed methods are compared with previously used approaches in a simulation study and illustrated in analyses of residential mobility using data from the British Household Panel Survey.

Public Policies, Women’s Employment after Childbearing, and Child Well-Being

Abstract In this paper, we consider three U.S. public policies that potentially influence the work decisions of mothers of infants—parental leave laws, exemptions from welfare work requirements, and child care subsidies for low-income families. We estimate the effects of these policies on the timing of work participation after birth, and on a range of outcomes in the subsequent four years, using a group difference-in-difference technique suitable for analysis of cross-sectional data. We find that the three policies affect early maternal work participation, but obtain no evidence of significant consequences for child well-being.

Residential Mobility: Wealth, Demographic and Housing Market Effects

The study presents a very simple model in which housing equity can influence mobility, and then estimates parameters that gauge the impact of housing equity, local house prices and other variables associated with household structure and change on residential movement within the UK. The data come from the British Household Panel Study over 1992–2008, which allow us to use within-person variation to identify the parameters. The parameter estimates indicate that estimates based on cross-section variation are seriously biased in our analysis. We check the robustness of our results to errors in measuring equity using an instrumental variable estimator. Our main finding is that an increase in a households housing equity encourages residential mobility substantially, and a decline discourages it.

Parent–child attachment as a mechanism of intergenerational (dis)advantage

A growing literature connects childhood socio-emotional skills to adult socio-economic outcomes. But what explains differing levels of socio-emotional skills? Current theories consider parental investment and socialisation, but neglect the emotional and relational aspects of parenting. Attachment theory offers a model of the micro-level mechanisms that connect parenting processes and socio-emotional development intergenerationally. It has, however, tended to de-emphasise macro, contextual socio-economic factors. Through an extensive, integrative review of the empirical literature on the effects and antecedents of parent–child attachment, we argue that attachment is a mechanism through which socio-emotional – and socio-economic – (dis)advantages persist.

A Longitudinal Mixed Logit Model for Estimation of Push and Pull Effects in Residential Location Choice

Abstract We develop a random effects discrete choice model for the analysis of households’ choice of neighborhood over time. The model is parameterized in a way that exploits longitudinal data to separate the influence of neighborhood characteristics on the decision to move out of the current area (“push” effects) and on the choice of one destination over another (“pull” effects). Random effects are included to allow for unobserved heterogeneity between households in their propensity to move, and in the importance placed on area characteristics. The model also includes area-level random effects. The combination of a large choice set, large sample size, and repeated observations mean that existing estimation approaches are often infeasible. We, therefore, propose an efficient MCMC algorithm for the analysis of large-scale datasets. The model is applied in an analysis of residential choice in England using data from the British Household Panel Survey linked to neighborhood-level census data. We consider how effects of area deprivation and distance from the current area depend on household characteristics and life course transitions in the previous year. We find substantial differences between households in the effects of deprivation on out-mobility and selection of destination, with evidence of severely constrained choices among less-advantaged households. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.