The role of work-family reconciliation policies in female employment and fertility recuperation in selected EU member states Kamila Utegenova Abstract Currently an increasing number of parents, in particularly women, experience conflict in work-family balance, which significantly affects the level of fertility in developed countries. The European Council is actively involved in solving this problem, since the general welfare of the country may directly depend on the balanced population reproduction. This work is aimed at identifying the effects of the special measures taken to improve women's employment efficiency - in the spheres of childcare arrangements, parental leave and gender equality. Keywords: fertility, employment, work-life balance, European Union member states

A large amount of literature has addressed the relationship between women’s employment and fertility in the Western context. We have less relevant knowledge about the context of East Asia. This thesis addresses this situation by providing insight into how women’s employment is interrelated with their fertility in South Korea. I investigate women’s life-course transitions to motherhood, labor force return after childbearing, and second childbearing, respectively. Data used for my analyses come from the Korea Labor and Income Panel Study (KLIPS). My studies show that the traditional practice of leaving the labor market at an early stage of family life has gradually been replaced by a pattern of staying at work until and during pregnancy. Among wage earners, women with stable employment positions are more likely than others to become a mother. Further, women with a good labor market standing are more likely to return to the labor force immediately after childbirth without any career interruption. Still, a considerable number of women shift to homemaking after childbirth. The outbreak of the Asian financial crisis in 1997 pushed mothers to hold tighter to the labor market than before. Labor force participation after first birth depresses women’s likelihood of having a second child. These studies suggest that a good labor market standing facilitates both motherhood entry and job continuity after childbirth in South Korea. However, the considerable number of women that shift to homemaking during motherhood and the depressed second birth rates of mothers in the labor force reveal that Korean women still face hardships when trying to combine work and family responsibilities. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 2: Manuscript. Paper 3: Manuscript.</p>

Recent literature finds that in OECD countries the cross- country correlation between the total fertility rate and the female labor force participation rate has changed from negative till the mid-1980s to positive afterwards. In sharp contrast, other studies show that this negative relationship continues to exist, however the magnitude of the effect is lower. In this paper I look at a panel of 23 OECD aggregate fertility and labor market data from 1965 – 2013 and account for country as well as year fixed effects. My findings document that there exists a negative relationship between fertility and female employment for the years 1965 – 1985, as there existed a high level of incompatibility between mother and worker roles at that time. After this time period no relationship between fertility and employment exists. The presence of a number of other country and year specific factors affects the level of labor force participation and fertility decisions of a woman. When accounted for, the cross-country time-series association between fertility and female employment seems to fade away and does not exist any longer after the mid-1980s.

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This dissertation includes three essays in applied microeconomics. The first two chapters focus on gender and female labor force participation. The third chapter examines the strategic behavior in politics. The first chapter examines the impact of male casualties due to World War II on fertility and female employment in the United States. We rely on the number of casualties at the county-level and use a differences-in-differences strategy. While most counties in the U.S. experienced a Baby Boom following the war, we find that the increase in fertility was lower in high casualty rate counties than in low casualty rate counties. Analyzing the channels through which male casualties could have decreased fertility, we provide evidence that county male casualties are positively related to 1950s female employment and household income. The second chapter examines the impact of gender focused labor legislation on women's labor force participation and economic empowerment. We rely on historical acts passed by state legislatures and exploit whether or not states passed regulatory laws regulating overall and industry specific employment and work conditions for women, night work laws and labor laws requiring provision of seats for working women. We exploit the fact that not all states enacted these laws as well as the variation in the timing of enactment of such laws. Our results show that women in comparison to men in treated states are more likely to be in the labor force after the introduction of seating and night work laws relative to control states. We also document the effect of industry-specific labor policies on women's likelihood to be employed in the affected industry and in higher-wage occupations within the industry of interest. Policy implications of our findings endorse the adoption of labor laws in favor of women to further their empowerment through a higher involvement in the labor market and financial independence. The third chapter examines strategic timing in the appearance of scandals about elected officials in the United States. In order to minimize negative publicity, politicians may strategically manipulate the timing of uncovering their own unpopular actions to coincide with other important events that are crowding the media and distracting the public. I start by developing a simple voting model to better understand the different mechanisms behind the timing of scandals' appearance. A forward-looking strategy implies that predictable news events may be used by politicians to distort public opinion. Using a novel data set of misconduct episodes from 1970 to 2020 and an instrumental variable strategy, I show that scandals are more likely to appear simultaneously with other foreseeable newsworthy events. I also examine the heterogeneity of different types of scandals and potentially different behavior across political parties. My findings suggest that Republican politicians are behaving especially strategically in timing the revelation of sexual and political misconducts.

This study focuses on the effects of the cash for care policy (CFC, in Swedish vårdnadsbidrag) on female employment in Sweden. The CFC was introduced in Sweden in 2008. It consists of a flat-rate sum paid by the municipalities to parents of children between age one and three, who decide to provide care for their children and do not use publicly subsidized daycare. The policy has been the object of heated political and social debates. The main object of the reform is increasing parents’ “freedom to choose”, but the policy is also feared to be a “housewife trap” by those opposing the reform. The study provides an overview of the use of CFC during the first years since its introduction, and an estimate of short-term effects of the use of CFC on female employment. Since it is voluntary for the municipalities to adopt the policy, municipalities have been analyzed as in a quasi-experiment, where some have been “treated” with the CFC policy, and some have not. First, female employment trends in similar types of treated and control municipalities were compared. Secondly, linear regressions were used to estimate the effects of the CFC policy on changes in female employment rates after the introduction of the policy, controlling for various characteristics of the municipalities such as: urban/rural areas, shares of highly educated women, shares of low educated women, shares of foreign-born women, total fertility rates. The study shows that, in general, the municipalities that offered the policy had higher female employment rates than the municipalities that did not offer it. Nevertheless, in rural areas the adoption of CFC had negative effects on female employment. On average, in rural areas female employment growth rates relative to years 2007-2012 in municipalities offering the policy were 2.42 percentage points lower than in control municipalities, all else being equal. Negative effects of CFC on female employment in municipalities with high shares of low educated women, high shares of foreign-born women and high fertility rates were not confirmed. The CFC policy has been recently adopted, mostly in urban municipalities and the proportion of parents that used CFC has been relatively low. Long terms effects of CFC on female employment will likely be dependent on whether the policy will be more widely used in the future and where.

Reconciling work and family life has been the topic of intense discussion in Europe over the past decade, in large part because the continent's declining and aging population makes it necessary to attract the widest possible range of European society into the labor force. One of the available segments comprises mothers and fathers with very young children. This thesis analyzes the formulation of family policy in the Czech Republic and its support in the aarea of reconciling family and professional life. The analysis herein is based on a comparison of international practices. The goal of this work is to evaluate the formulation of the relevant instruments of family policy that are intended to help people successfully balance family and work.

Self-employment has been considered an important part of recovering and growing economy as well as an area of interest of current governing bodies on national and supranational level. Therefore, this study aims to provide deeper understanding, what influences self-employment and how does such influence differ between men and women. Purpose of the study is threefold. First, to synthesize a model of influential factors based on current academic debate. Second, to analyze the case of the Czech Republic (exceptional in higher self-employment growth rates for women than men) to understand whether gender difference phenomenon is universal or only limited to time/space/industry. And third, to analyze what are factors driving self-employment. To answer the question ​How does influence of factors on self-employment differ between genders? ​correlation research design is introduced to examine relationships between micro- and macro-environment factors (explanatory variable) and gender specific self-employment rate (response variable). To analyze these relationships, secondary data collected from online open source platforms of national and supranational public institutions are utilized. Firstly, comparability analysis is conducted between male and female (self-)employment development in Czechia. Secondly,...

This study sets out to understand the position of Turkish women in gendered jobs and jobs with different levels of prestige from the 1980s to the 2000s, and to compare this position to that of women in similar countries where possible. Although Turkish women's enrolment rates in traditionally male subjects in higher education is above the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average and despite the fact that they exceed their male counterparts in their graduation rates in most of the university subjects, this success is not reflected in the labour market. Turkish women are mostly trapped in female occupations with medium level of prestige and are particularly excluded from top-ranked jobs. This study argues that the vicious circle of society's expectations of women in the private sphere and the statistical discrimination based on the fulfilment of these expectations affect women's likelihood to be in these jobs negatively. While increasing educational level strongly improves women's position in male-dominated jobs (within 'professional, scientific and technical jobs' category in particular) and their prestige levels, evidence also shows that there is still a drastic lost potential in respect of highly qualified women's employment considering that still in 2010s, there is a remarkable proportion of highly educated women who are not in paid work. It is observed that in 2012, women expanded their attainment in relatively low-prestige jobs and increased their participation further in professional jobs in accordance with their rising higher educational attainment, yet still only 3% of working women are in managerial jobs (TurkStat, 2012). This implies that the prescribed gender roles that saddle women with the heavy burden in the private sphere, which also affect highly educated women's career trajectories, could even be more persisting than the influence of the traditional social structure on women's work that is expected to cause low qualified women to be represented at low rates in (less prestigious) jobs with non-traditional conditions. Considering that women withdraw from the labour market mostly due to marriage, and the findings show that marriage and having children have a negative impact on women's careers at large, attention should be focused on the private sphere. Looking at Turkish households, it is found that the gender segregation at work is reflected in the private sphere: women undertake the demanding traditionally female housework and while there are more potential sources of support for childcare compared to household chores, women's employment status and level of income also do not make a substantial difference in terms of the former also the unbalanced domestic division of labour unlike it is for the latter. Results demonstrate that Turkish men do not have a particularly traditional gender ideology regarding women's paid work. However, their lack of involvement in female chores creates a barrier for women's careers in a semi-direct pattern. The findings refer to the need for a faster increase in Turkish women's higher educational attainment and a stronger external support system via social policies at work and at home. It is also important to reinforce a more egalitarian gender ideology regarding men's roles as spouses and fathers as well as to promote the importance of women's different roles in private and public spheres, not only as wives and mothers but also as individuals, citizens and employers/employees.

Les inégalités de revenus et la polarisation de l'emploi ont augmenté dans plusieurs pays au cours des dernières décennies, suscitant des préoccupations d'équité ainsi que des interrogations concernant les politiques de redistribution. Cette thèse répond à deux questions primordiales. La première concerne le rôle des heures travaillées et de leur dispersion pour expliquer les inégalités de revenu; la seconde porte sur le rôle de l'offre de travail des femmes dans l'explication de la polarisation de l'emploi. Le premier chapitre utilise des données pour les États-Unis, le Royaume-Uni, l'Allemagne et la France et examine comment les inégalités de revenu sont affectées par la dispersion des heures de travail. Le principal enseignement de cette approche est que la dispersion des heures de travail peut expliquer plus d'un tiers des inégalités de revenu dans certains pays et que la corrélation entre le salaire horaire et les heures travaillées s'est accrue au fil du temps. Le second chapitre s'appuie sur les résultats du précédent et explore les mécanismes qui expliquent la tendance à la hausse de la corrélation entre salaires et heures travaillées. Nous constatons qu'une plus grande volatilité de la production agrégée et une réglementation plus stricte du marché du travail ont tendance à réduire l'élasticité, alors qu'une augmentation du commerce dans un secteur les augmente. Enfin, le troisième chapitre met l'accent sur le rôle des femmes hautement qualifiées dans l'évolution du marché des substituts de la production domestique et montre que, lorsque les femmes hautement qualifiées travaillent plus d'heures, les femmes moins qualifiées sont plus susceptibles d'être employées. / Earnings inequality and job polarization have increased in a number of countries during the last decades, raising concerns of fairness and fostering debates on the implications for redistributive policies. This thesis asks two main questions. The first concerns the relevance of hours worked and their dispersion for earnings inequality, while the second question investigates the role of female labour supply in explaining the increase in job polarization. The first chapter uses data for the USA, the UK, Germany, and France and examines how earnings inequality is affected by the dispersion of working hours. The main result of this exercise is that hours dispersion can account for over a third of earnings inequality in some countries and that the relevance of the correlation between wages and working hours has been growing over time. The second chapter builds on the results of the previous one and explores the forces behind the upward trend of the correlation between wages and working hours. We find that greater aggregate output volatility and stricter labour market regulation tend to reduce the elasticity, while a greater trade share in an industry raises it. Finally, the third chapter investigates the relevance of female employment for job polarization in Germany. The analysis focuses on the role of high-skilled females in the evolution of a market for home production substitutes and finds that when top-employed females work more hours, low-skilled women are more likely to be employed.