Frauke H. Peter

Towards a Framework for Assessing Family Policies in the EU

This report presents the results of a first attempt to create a framework for assessing the performance of national family policies. The report is part of a joint EU and OECD project, which aims to help the EU Government Expert Group on Demographic Issues in evaluating national family policies. The idea behind the framework is that it allows individual countries to compare their overall performance in the area of family policies with the performance of other countries. The main focus of the report is policies for families with smaller children. The framework provides a set of cross-nationally comparable indicators on contexts, policy measures, and outcomes, organised on a systematic basis. The policy measure indicators presented in the report cover leave schemes, early childhood education and care, family benefits and workplace policies. The indicators build upon, inter alia, previous work by the OECD in various studies on family-friendly policies that were carried out on a cross-national basis using different sets of indicators. Most of these indicators are today available in the OECD Family Database. Wherever the OECD Family Database contains indicators for the majority of EU member states and OECD countries, these data have been used in the present study. Otherwise, data from other cross-national databases have been included. Each indicator in the framework is presented as a single-standing indicator in the general absence of scientific consensus on different aggregation weights. In the report no explicit ranking of countries has been attempted, instead the relative position of countries has been illustrated with the help of standard deviation scores. In the last part of the report the linkages between policy aims and the various context, outcome and policy measures are indicated, which help construct “score cards”. This “score card-approach” is illustrated for three countries: Denmark, Germany and the United Kingdom. The report offers tools for assessment that may be developed further, and should offer an approach to using the OECD Family Database, acknowledging this unique data source for cross-country comparisons in the field of family policy. Ce rapport presente les resultats d’une premiere tentative d’elaborer un cadre d’evaluation de la performance des politiques nationales en faveur des familles. Ce rapport fait partie d’un projet elabore conjointement par l’Union europeenne et l’OCDE, qui vise a aider le groupe d’experts gouvernementaux sur les sujets demographiques de l’UE pour evaluer les politiques nationales d’aides aux familles. L’idee sous-jacente est de permettre a chaque pays de comparer ses performances avec celles des autres pays. Les familles avec de jeunes enfants sont le principal sujet d’analyse de ce rapport. Le cadre elabore propose un ensemble d’indicateurs comparables entre pays sur les contextes, les mesures politiques et les resultats, organises sur une base systematique. Les indicateurs de mesures politiques couvrent les dispositifs de conge, d’aides a l’education et aux soins accordees a la petite enfance, les prestations financieres et les politiques liees au lieu de travail. Ces indicateurs ont ete elabores, inter alia, a partir des travaux anterieurs de l’OCDE sur les politiques favorables aux familles qui ont ete conduites de maniere comparative sur la base de differents ensembles d’indicateurs. La plupart de ces indicateurs sont aujourd’hui disponibles au sein de la base de donnees OCDE sur les Familles. Ces indicateurs ont ete inclus pour la majorite des pays de l’UE et de l’OCDE pour lesquels ils sont disponibles. Lorsqu’ils n’etaient pas disponibles, des donnees provenant de bases internationales ont ete prises en compte. Chaque indicateur est presente ici de facon separee, car il n’y a pas de consensus scientifique sur la ponderation qui permettrait de les agreger. Aucun classement explicite des pays n’a ete tente ici ; la position relative des pays est, au contraire, illustree au moyen de scores d’ecarts-types. Dans la derniere partie du rapport, les liens entre les objectifs politiques et les variables de contexte de resultats et de mesures politiques sont pris en compte pour elaborer des « cartes de score ». Cette approche par « cartes de scores » est illustree pour trois pays : le Danemark, l’Allemagne et le Royaume-Uni. Ce rapport offre des outils d’evaluation qui pourront etre encore developpes, et devrait offrir une approche de la maniere d’utiliser la base de donnees de l’OCDE sur les Familles, qui constitue une source de donnees incontournable pour faire des comparaisons internationales dans le champ des politiques familiales.

Family Instability and Locus of Control in Adolescence

Abstract Investigating the impact of family instability is important as more and more children experience different family changes in many industrialized countries. In this paper we examine the dynamics of family structure, looking at the potential effect of yearly maternal partnership transitions on adolescents’ locus of control. We aim at combining research on family instability with research on non-cognitive skill formation. We use rich and nationwide German data to identify the relationship between family instability and adolescent locus of control. Combining entropy balancing with a novel econometric method to assess potential bias from omitted variables, we find that experiencing maternal partnership transitions is negatively associated with adolescents’ belief in self-determination and that internal locus of control is reduced by about a fifth of a standard deviation among those affected, even after conditioning on a large number of covariates. This is particularly true if the transitions take place during “middle childhood.”