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This article reframes the debate on the consequences of flexibilization in European labour markets focusing on the unexplored impact of temporary employment on occupational wages for permanent workers. Exploiting the variation in the temps’ density within occupation and age groups across European countries between 2003 and 2010, we find that temporary contracts negatively affect occupational average wages for insiders’ workers. These results are still robust using a dynamic system based on generalized method of moments (GMM-SYS) to account for potential endogeneity issues. We also explore the existence of heterogeneity across different occupational clusters and institutional settings. Our estimates indicate that the knock-on effect is large in countries with low employment protection legislation and it is driven by occupations characterized by untechnical work logics.

Although it is well-known that care responsibilities are strongly gendered also in later life, the consequences for older women of juggling work and care responsibilities are understudied. This study contributes to fill this gap by focusing on the wellbeing implications for older European women of combining work and grandchild care. The role strain and role enhancement theories guide our theoretical predictions. While the former predicts a lower wellbeing due to the double burden of grandchild care and paid work, the latter posits an increase in wellbeing through the accumulation of social identities or roles. By using longitudinal data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), we investigate whether grandmothers who do and those who do not work experience different levels of quality of life, depressive symptoms and life satisfaction. Our statistical model consists in a fixed-effect regression that adjusts for the lagged outcome. Results show that, among grandmothers engaged in paid work, grandchild care is not significantly associated with any of the three outcomes considered. Instead, non-working grandmothers seem to benefit from provision of grandchild care, in terms of higher quality of life and lower number of depressive symptoms. As thus, the provision of grandchild care tends to be beneficial for grandmothers’ wellbeing only if they do not combine this activity with paid work. Juggling paid work and childcare to grandchildren may result in an excessive burden which eliminates the potential benefits of grandchild care on older women’s wellbeing.

Comparing West Germany and the United States, we analyze the association between equity - in terms of the relative gender division of paid and unpaid work hours – and the risk of marriage dissolution. Our aim is to identify under what conditions equity influences couple stability. We apply event-history analysis to marriage histories using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel for Western Germany and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics for the United States for the period 1986 to 2009. For the United States, we find that deviation from equity is particularly destabilizing when the wife under-benefits, and when both partners' paid work hours are similar. In West Germany, equity is less salient. Instead we find that the male breadwinner model remains the single most stable arrangement.

ObjectiveTo examine the association between divorce and partners' allocation of paid and unpaid work, and change over a few key decades in both West Germany and the United States.BackgroundPast research has indicated that partner similarity in time spent on both paid and unpaid work is associated with a higher risk of marital dissolution. We explore whether the association between paid work disparities and divorce or between unpaid work disparities and divorce changed across time or differed between two cultures.MethodUsing data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics for the United States and the German Socio‐Economic Panel for West Germany from the mid‐1980s until the end of the 2000s, we conducted event history analyses.ResultsOver time, the risk of divorce declined among couples with a more similar division of labor. In parallel, the relative stability of marriages adhering to a dissimilar pattern of unpaid work decreased in Western Germany.ConclusionThese results contrast with the predictions of a static normative perspective, but they are consistent with the multiple equilibrium theory, which predicts that divorce risks will decline in tandem with the embrace of more gender similarity in couple arrangements. Thus, evidence suggests that as societies evolve toward greater gender similarity in the division of paid and unpaid work, marital stability will likely improve.ImplicationsPreventive intervention approaches promoting new forms of organization in the division of work between partners may be useful in the quest for improved marital relations and well‐being.

Comparing West Germany and the United States, we analyze the association between equity - in terms of the relative gender division of paid and unpaid work hours – and the risk of marriage dissolution. Our aim is to identify under what conditions equity influences couple stability. We apply event-history analysis to marriage histories using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel for Western Germany and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics for the United States for the period 1986 to 2009. For the United States, we find that deviation from equity is particularly destabilizing when the wife under-benefits, and when both partners’ paid work hours are similar. In West Germany, equity is less salient. Instead we find that the male breadwinner model remains the single most stable arrangement.

OBJECTIVETime preferences, also referred to as impatience, is a personal characteristic that has been found to influence different types of decisions, from financial investments to schooling decisions. The present study is the first that empirically explores whether this trait represents a determinant of human reproductive behaviors. BACKGROUNDFertility decisions, as all life actions, imply a balancing of anticipated costs and benefits whose expectations are formed under uncertainty. Fertility research has addressed the backward reasonings (e.g., socioeconomic, psychological, biological factors) influencing fertility decisions. Yet, the role of forward factors, such as the preference for immediate but lower benefits versus future but higher benefits, in influencing fertility decisions has been overlooked. METHODData are from the Survey on Household Income and Wealth carried out by the Bank of Italy every two years on a sample of about 8,000 households. In particular, we make use of a question included in the 2004, 2008, 2010, and 2012 waves to examine whether, controlling for backward factors, impatience affects parity progressions. RESULTSResults from logistic regression models indicate an inverse U-shaped association between impatience and the transition to the first and second child during the observation period, meaning that for very impatient and very patient individuals the probability of having a first and second child is lower than for individuals within intermediate levels of impatience.

This paper contributes to the literature on Relative Risk Aversion theory in two ways: first, by considering that the effect of time preferences may differ according to both children’s gender and social origin; second, by exploring this possibility for different educational outcomes: upper secondary school choices and university enrolment. We use data of the Survey of Household Income and Wealth, which contains questions specifically addressed to capture individual’s time discounting preference, to further explore the association between time discounting preference and the effect of social origin on educational outcomes in Italy. In line with prior research, we find that time preferences only have a meaningful effect among children of lowly educated parents. But such an effect, in turn, differs by gender: parental time preferences matter more for sons than for daughters of lowly educated parents. This gender effect is found both for upper secondary choices and for entry into higher education.