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Abstract:
France and the United Kingdom represent two contrasting institutional models for the integration of employment and motherhood, respectively the 'universalistic' regime type that offers subsidized child-care and maternity-leave benefits to women at all income levels, and the 'means-testing' regime type that offers predominantly income-tested benefits for single mothers. Using the two countries as comparative case studies, the authors develop and test the hypothesis that the socio-economic gradient of fertility timing has become increasingly mediated by family policy. They hypothesize and find increasing polarization in age at first birth by pre-childbearing occupation between the 1980s and 1990s in the U.K. but not in France. Early first childbearing persisted in the U.K. only among women in low-skill occupations, while shifts towards increasingly late first births occurred in clerical/secretarial occupations and above. Increases in age at first birth occurred across all occupations in France, but this was still much earlier on average than for all but low-skill British mothers.

fertility, mothers-employment

Abstract:
The labor-market assimilation hypothesis predicts poorer initial labor-market outcomes among immigrants followed by convergence towards the outcomes of the native-born working-age population with time lived in the receiving country. The authors investigate the applicability of this hypothesis to migrant women's labor force participation in Europe. They compare labor force participation rate (LFPR) gaps between migrant and native-born women in nine European countries, and examine how these LFPR gaps change with migrant women's additional years in the receiving country. Consistent with the assimilation hypothesis, the LFPRs of migrant women in the "old" migrant-receiving countries of Western Europe begin much lower than for otherwise-comparable nativeborn women and converge, though not always completely, towards the LFPRs of nativeborn women with additional years lived in the country. In the "new" migrant-receiving countries of Southern Europe, however, the LFPRs of migrant women at all durations of residence are similar to those of native-born women. Additional descriptive evidence suggests that differences in migrant admission and integration contexts are more plausible explanations for these contrasting Southern and Western European patterns than are explanations based on immigrant women's assumed greater family-role orientations.

Abstract:
The claim that family-policy regime may influence socio-economic differentials in fertility has to date been explored mainly with respect to 'liberal' Anglo-American regimes. The authors broaden the contrast with 'family-friendly' regimes here to include in the 'family-unfriendly' group 'conservative' Southern European regimes. Comparing education differentials in age at first birth, they find educationally-heterogeneous shifts between 1950s and 1960s birth cohorts of women in Greece, Italy, and Spain. The patterns of these shifts are similar to those seen for British and American birth cohorts, and contrast with educationally-homogeneous shifts across birth cohorts in Norway and France. They argue that these findings support the hypothesis that the role of family-policy regime in mediating growth in socio-economic differentials in fertility has increased as combining employment and family has become more normative among women throughout industrialized countries.

Abstract:
The resilience of family and household structure to displacement-inducing natural disaster is investigated. Households from a survey that traces the outcomes of a population-representative sample of households in New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina are compared statistically to households from a national sample. Household breakup following Katrina was extremely high among extended-family households, exacerbated by the high prevalence of extended-family households in New Orleans before the hurricane. While the highest rates of household breakup occurred among households whose residences were made uninhabitable by the Hurricane and its aftermath, city-wide impacts on household breakup were found.

Abstract:
Many studies of single motherhood and related problems of welfare use and poverty have used data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). Unfortunately, the PSID's Family Unit (FU) Head definition omits subfamily single mothers not observed to leave their household of origin. Resulting biases in terms of the age, race, welfare use, and poverty status are estimated in the present study by using the 1968-85 PSID Relationship File. Substantial undercounts of single mothers in the younger ages and some overcounts at older ages are found, especially for black mothers.