This thesis investigates how family–employment reconciliation issues associated with single motherhood affect women’s employment careers. The study fills a gap in the literature, which rarely considers single motherhood and employment as processes in the life course, much less in a cross-country comparative perspective. Patterns of employment trajectories during and after single motherhood are examined as the outcome of individual and institutional circumstances. Great Britain and West Germany are used as contrasting cases that represent relatively different contexts of labour market structures and family policy. Longitudinal individual-level data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) are analysed, looking at the period between and including 1991–2008. The thesis develops a theoretical model that assumes differential career outcomes for experiencing single motherhood at different life stages. Higher difficulties of family–employment reconciliation are predicted for women experiencing single motherhood at a young age compared to later stages. The acquisition of marketable resources, which stands in the context of education systems, is assumed to be one of the central mechanisms mediating the relationship between age at single motherhood and employment. Moreover, policies directed at single parents affect reconciliation, shaping opportunity structures on which women can draw in single motherhood. Compared to the German context, Britain provides little institutional support securing labour market attachment for women in single motherhood, particularly when their children are young. Although providing more generous family policy measures in comparison, West German maternity leave regulations are often not applicable to women in single motherhood, and childcare is mostly granted on a half-day basis. The findings from three steps of empirical analysis provide new insights and highlight specific facets of established facts. First, fixed effects logistic regression is used, which exposes a negative association between single motherhood and entering full-time employment. No differences are observed between partnered and unpartnered mothers, but effective childcare arrangements support women’s transition in both Britain and West Germany. The second step of the analysis explores employment career patterns during and after single motherhood using sequence analysis. The emerging typical patterns are observed to different degrees in the two country contexts. On average, more employment trajectories dominated by non-employment are observed in Britain and by part-time employment in West Germany. In the last step, these findings are used in an explanatory framework, the results of which provide evidence for the life stage hypothesis. The analysis demonstrates that not only social class but also mother’s age, children’s age and skill levels seem to foster employment stability and labour market attachment during and after single motherhood.

The purpose of this study was to determine whether maternal employment contributed to the general inadequacy of the adolescent's evening meal, and to examine the attitudes of adolescents regarding the mother's role in evening meal preparation. A questionnaire was administered to 1180 high school students in a suburban area of Dallas-Ft.Worth in May, 1987. The hypotheses were tested using Chi square, Pearson product moment correlation, and Anova. Results indicated that maternal employment affects adolescent evening meals in the number of meals offered per week, fully prepared by mother, and eaten away from home. The amount of adolescent participation in meal preparation was higher for the employed group. Attitudes are different between the sexes and those with employed and unemployed mothers.

Thesis advisor: Rebekah L. Coley / The goal of this dissertation was to delineate the repercussions of early maternal employment for children's early developmental competencies in the U.S., Australia, and the U.K. and to test economic and psychological theories regarding potential mechanisms linking maternal employment with children's development, including time, money, and stress. Prior research has focused on older, non-representative cohorts of American children, with results suggesting full-time employment in the first year after childbirth is linked with lower cognitive and behavioral skills. It is unclear if these same patterns exist in more recent cohorts and in other countries with differing cultural expectations and policy environments for families, most notably more comprehensive parental leave policies. Data came from representative samples of children born in each country between 2000 and 2004: (1) the U.S.'s Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (N=10,100), (2) Australia's Longitudinal Study of Australian Children-Birth Cohort (N=5,093), and (3) the U.K.'s Millennium Cohort Study (N= 18,497). In each dataset, mother's employment data were coded to assess the month of entry into employment following childbirth. Extensive, well-validated direct assessment, mother report, and teacher report measures assessed children's cognitive and behavioral skills following entry into formal schooling. Descriptive data showed very different patterns of entry into employment: American mothers entered employment the earliest and at the highest intensity with more gradual, lower intensity returns by Australian and British mothers. OLS regression models weighted with propensity scores and controlling for a rich array of child and maternal characteristics suggested that early movements into employment had few associations with children's cognitive or behavioral skills in any of the countries. These neutral associations were not differentiated by maternal time, stress, or wages. However, as non-maternal household income decreased, early employment was linked with higher cognitive skills in the U.S. while employment begun before two years was linked with higher behavioral skills in Australia. There was no evidence of moderation by non-maternal household income in the U.K. Findings are discussed in terms of their implications for work family policy. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2013. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Counseling, Developmental, and Educational Psychology.

This dissertation explores issues on women’s employment and children’s health in economics. In chapter I, I investigate the causal effects of maternal employment on childhood obesity. Empirical analysis of the effects of maternal employment on childhood obesity is complicated by the endogeneity of mother’s labor supply. A mother’s decision to work likely reflects underlying factors – such as ability and motivation – that could directly influence child health outcomes. To address this concern, this study implements an instrumental variables (IV) strategy which utilizes exogenous variation in maternal employment coming from the youngest sibling’s school eligibility. With data on children ages 7-17 from the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth linked to the Child Supplement, I explore the effects of maternal employment on children’s BMI z-score and probabilities of being overweight and obese. OLS estimates indicate a moderate association, consistent with the prior literature. However, the IV estimates show that an increase in mothers’ labor supply leads to large weight gains among children, suggesting that not addressing the endogeneity of maternal employment leads to underestimated causal effects. Chapter II examines the effects of Walmart Supercenters on household and child food insecurity. Walmart Supercenters may reduce food insecurity by lowering food prices and expanding food availability. Our food insecurity-related outcomes come from the 2001-2007 waves of the December Current Population Survey Food Security Supplement. We match these data to our hand-collected data of Walmart Supercenters at the census tract-level. First, we estimate a naïve linear probability model and find that households and children who live near Walmart Supercenters are more likely than others to be food insecure. Since the location of Walmart Supercenters might be endogenous, we then turn to instrumental variables models that utilize the predictable geographic expansion patterns of Walmart Supercenters outward from Walmart’s corporate headquarters. The IV estimates suggest that the causal effect of Walmart Supercenters is to reduce food insecurity among households and children. The effect is largest among low-income families. In the third paper, I investigate the effects of the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) on women’s labor market outcomes. The FMLA is a federal policy that aims to help workers balance job and family responsibilities. However, it may have unintended consequences on employment because it imposes costs on firms. In this study, I investigate the impact of the FMLA with labor market flows—i.e., hires, separations and recalls. Focusing on labor market flow outcomes is crucial to identifying the immediate impact of the policy because employment and wages adjust slowly when there is a policy change while labor market flows are flexible. Using data from the Quarterly Workforce Indicators and adopting a triple-difference model, I get results that are unlikely to be interpreted as causal because the data are insufficient to obtain precise estimates. However, the idea of using labor market flows can be easily applied to a broad range of topics relate to workplace mandates.

This dissertation traces the formation, development, and deployment of arguments in favor of maternal employment from the years before World War II through the mid-1990s. Drawing on academic journals, popular periodicals, government documents, feminist writings, and the personal papers of researchers, policy makers, and activists, I argue that defenses of maternal employment have taken two main forms: economic and psychosocial. Although both types appeared throughout this period, the relative influence of each waxed and waned. As a result of the legacy of depression and war mobilization, economic arguments predominated in the immediate postwar years. After a decade of sustained national growth and the rising influence of psychology and sociology, however, arguments that stressed the psychological and social benefits of working mothers became increasingly prominent. The trend reversed again in the 1970s as the economy stagnated and hostility toward the welfare state mounted. The content of these two types of arguments also changed over time. Defenses of maternal employment that were rooted in and justified by the concept of shared national good in postwar America were reframed, by the 1990s, in terms of the economic self-interest of individual taxpayers and employers. During the 1940s and 1950s, proponents of maternal employment suggested that it helped expand the middle class and foster children’s independence. Feminists in the early 1960s drew on these claims to challenge hostility toward mothers in the labor force. By the early 1970s, they hoped that working mothers, by undermining traditional sex role socialization, would help remake, rather than preserve, society. At the same time, a new set of economic claims about working mothers, based in free market economic thought, began to gain strength. Politicians attacked welfare policies that enabled poor mothers to be full-time homemakers, while some feminists tried to persuade corporations that they had financial, rather than moral, incentives for hiring and retaining mothers. The vision of the broader social good that had characterized earlier arguments for maternal employment was gone. This helps explain why, even as rates of maternal employment skyrocketed, national work/family policies in the United States have remained the weakest in the developed world. / History

Submitted by Raphael dos Santos (rdsantos@id.uff.br) on 2017-07-06T19:46:24Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertacao_Raphael_bib.pdf: 728939 bytes, checksum: 3e338c45a911c473f53ccef8dece975b (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Marcia Bacha (marcia.bacha@fgv.br) on 2017-07-06T20:13:10Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertacao_Raphael_bib.pdf: 728939 bytes, checksum: 3e338c45a911c473f53ccef8dece975b (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-07-06T20:13:37Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertacao_Raphael_bib.pdf: 728939 bytes, checksum: 3e338c45a911c473f53ccef8dece975b (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-03-30 / This paper investigates possible effects of maternity leave extension from 120 to 180 days in Brazil on labor market participation of mothers. In order to do so, we explore changes in leave taking rules between January 2007 and December 2009 affecting public sector workers in a RD design. Using administrative data we are able to measure maternal employment outcomes. Results suggests there was no impact of extension on maternal employment one year after leave or at the time of the child's school enrollment. However eligibility for maternity leave extension increase maternal employment by 2 percentage points on maternal employment one year after childbirth for high income mothers. Preliminary findings indicate indicate no effect of leave extension on school enrollment by age 6.

I explore the relationship between quality of maternal employment and children’s reading achievement between six to thirteen years of age using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. The hypotheses assert that job quality in terms of level of autonomy, supervisory power, complexity with people, data and things, and family benefits have significant positive effects on children’s reading achievement. The least squares estimates indicate that complexity, power, and autonomy has significant positive effects for children while the effects of family benefits is weak with the exception of the positive effect of union membership for racially disadvantaged groups.

No description available.

Structural equation modeling was used to explore associations between maternal work-to-family conflict, maternal involvement in schooling, and academic outcomes in early adolescents. Among a subsample of 725 fifth graders (and their employed mothers and teachers) from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (NICHD SECCYD), multigroup analyses were used to explore differences in this relationship between groups with mothers working part-time versus full-time. Results revealed that among part-time employed mothers maternal involvement in school fully mediated the relationship between maternal work-to-family conflict and fifth graders' academic achievement. For full-time employed mothers, maternal work-to-family conflict was not related to maternal involvement in school or academic outcomes. These findings suggest that mothers' involvement in school may be an important way in which negative outcomes of work-to-family conflict may be minimized. Prior research has not investigated the associations between work-to-family conflict and child outcomes. The present study suggests a need to further understand how aspects of the work-family interface relate to children. Further, results suggest a need to better understand the differences in the work-family interface between families where mothers are employed part-time versus full-time.

Diese Dissertation behandelt die Erwerbstätigkeit von Müttern, Fertilität und die Entwicklung von Kindern in Deutschland. In Kapitel zwei evaluieren wir den Effekt der Elterngeldreform von 2007. Zunächst zeigen wir die „child penalty“, den Effekt der Mutterschaft auf die Erwerbstätigkeit. Wir verwenden dann die errechneten „child penalties“ vor und nach der Reform, um zu zeigen, dass die Reform positive Effekte auf die mittelfristige Erwerbstätigkeit hatte. Kapitel drei konzentriert sich auf die sogenannten „Cash-for-Care“-Transferleistungen für Eltern von ein- bis zweijährigen Kindern. Ich zeige eine signifikante Reduzierung der Beschäftigung bei Migrantinnen, wenn die potenziellen Leistungen erhöht werden. Es gibt positive Auswirkungen auf die Fertilität. Keine signifikanten Effekte finde ich für die Entwicklung der Kinder. In Kapitel vier untersuchen wir den Effekt der deutschen Ganztagsgrundschulen auf die Schulkinder. Unsere Ergebnisse zeigen positive Auswirkungen auf die Schulleistungen. Wir stellen auch signifikante positive Peer-Effekte der Ganztagsprogramme fest. Allerdings finden wir nicht, dass diese Programme zur Verringerung der Ungleichheit im Schulsystem beitragen. Kapitel fünf behandelt die Untererfassung von Teilzeit in den administrativen Arbeitsmarktdaten, welche bis 2011 vorkam. Wir entwickeln eine Korrekturmethode für fehlerhalft als Vollzeit registrierte Teilzeitbeschäftigungsverhältnisse. Die Korrektur hat Auswirkungen auf die Entwicklung der Lohnungleichheit, aber auch die Müttererwerbstätigkeit. Zusammenfassend befasst sich meine Dissertation mit dem Zeitraum von der Geburt bis zur Grundschule und untersucht Effekte auf Mütter und Kinder. Darüber hinaus wird die fehlerhafte Erfassung von Teilzeitbeschäftigungen in den administrativen Arbeitsmarktdaten adressiert. Die Arbeit zielt darauf ab, wertvolle Erkenntnisse über die Auswirkungen von Transferleistungen und die Gestaltung von Grundschulprogrammen auf Familien in Deutschland zu liefern. / This dissertation examines various aspects related to maternal employment, fertility and the skill development of children in Germany. In chapter two, we develop an estimation method for the causal effect of the 2007 parental benefits reform in Germany. Therefore, we first estimate the "child penalty'' on employment outcomes, then we use the estimated child penalties before and after reform implementation to assess reform effects. We find that the reform had positive effects on medium-run employment. Chapter three focuses on the so-called "cash-for-care''-transfers for parents of children aged one to two. I find a significant reduction of employment for migrant mothers if the potential benefit amount is increased. There are positive effects on fertility for the average of the population. However, I do not find significant effects on the skill development of children. In chapter four, we study the expansions of German all-day schools and their impact on children's outcomes. Our findings reveal evidence of positive impacts on children's achievements. We also show significant positive peer effects from classmates attending all-day programs. However, we do not find significant evidence that these programs significantly contribute to decreasing inequality in the German school system. Chapter five addresses an important aspect in the administrative labor market data. By developing a correction for misreported part-time employment spells which happened in the years prior 2011. The corrected data have implications for studying wage inequality, but also for studying maternal employment as the part-time share is very high among mothers of young children. In summary, this dissertation studies the period from birth to primary school. It covers topics such as maternal employment, fertility and skill development. Additionally, it addresses the data problem of misreported part-time spells in the administrative labor market data and presents a correction methodology.