Previous research has documented that children who do not live with both biological parents fare somewhat worse on a variety of outcomes than those who do. In this article, which is the introduction to the Special Issue on ''Family dynamics and children's well-being and life chances in Europe,'' we refine this picture by identifying variation in this conclusion depending on the family transitions and subpopulations studied. We start by discussing the general evidence accumulated for parental separation and ask whether the same picture emerges from research on other family transitions and structures. Subsequently, we review studies that have aimed to deal with endogeneity and discuss whether issues of causality challenge the general picture of family transitions lowering child well-being. Finally, we discuss whether previous evidence finds effects of family transitions on child outcomes to differ between children from different socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds, and across countries and time-periods studied. Each of the subsequent articles in this Special Issue contributes to these issues. Population (2017) 33:163-184 DOI 10.1007 evidence on how several less often studied family forms relate to child outcomes in the European context. Two other articles in this Special Issue contribute by resolving several key questions in research on variation in the consequences of parental separation by socioeconomic and immigrant background, two areas of research that have produced conflicting results so far.Eur J

We use the British Cohort Study 1970 to show that the proportion of children achieving a tertiary education degree is 8 percentage points lower for the offspring of separated parents than for children from intact families. Moreover, the children of highly educated parents experience a two times larger 'separation penalty' than the children of less educated parents. We find a similar pattern of heterogeneity in effects for the likelihood of participation in academic education (A-Levels) beyond school leaving age but not for school grades at age 16. We test three different explanations for heterogeneity in the parental separation penalty: changes in family relations, changes in income, and negative selection into separation based on unobserved characteristics. We address the potential endogeneity of parental separation by including pre-separation observable characteristics, individual fixed effects models, and a placebo test. Our key finding is that changes in family income, but not those in family relations or selection, explain a large part of heterogeneity in the effects of parental separation. Children with more highly educated parents face a larger decline in family income if parents separate and, in addition, declines in family income of equal amounts entail more negative consequences for their educational attainment.In recent years, an interesting finding has surfaced in the literature addressing the effects of parental separation on child outcomes. Several studies have found that parental separation has a greater impact on the educational and occupational attainment of children from socioeconomically advantaged backgrounds than on the attainment of their counterparts from more disadvantaged backgrounds (Biblarz and Raferty, 1993;McLanahan and Sandefur, 1994;Martin, 2012). 1 This seems a surprising result. Studies in social stratification have shown that children from advantaged socio-economic backgrounds are less affected by previous negative outcomes and disadvantageous life events that might hinder their future prospect of educational attainment (cf. Bernardi 2014). These 'compensatory effects' in education are often held responsible for the lack of downward mobility of children from higher socio-economic backgrounds (Boudon, 1998). Understanding why such 'compensatory effects' are absent in the case of parental separation could enhance our understanding of the processes that

Based on harmonized census data from 81 countries, we estimate how age and coresidence patterns shape the vulnerability of countries’ populations to outbreaks of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). We estimate variation in deaths arising due to a simulated random infection of 10% of the population living in private households and subsequent within-household transmission of the virus. The age structures of European and North American countries increase their vulnerability to COVID-related deaths in general. The coresidence patterns of elderly persons in Africa and parts of Asia increase these countries’ vulnerability to deaths induced by within-household transmission of COVID-19. Southern European countries, which have aged populations and relatively high levels of intergenerational coresidence, are, all else equal, the most vulnerable to outbreaks of COVID-19. In a second step, we estimate to what extent avoiding primary infections for specific age groups would prevent subsequent deaths due to within-household transmission of the virus. Preventing primary infections among the elderly is the most effective in countries with small households and little intergenerational coresidence, such as France, whereas confining younger age groups can have a greater impact in countries with large and intergenerational households, such as Bangladesh.

The division of domestic work bears little resemblance to the ideals of rational specialization espoused in Becker's (1991) theory. Many sociologists explain this as a manifestation of 'doing gender'. We argue that a multiple equilibrium framework can help account for variations in couple specialization. The framework is dynamic, highlights the presence of competing normative regimes, and it helps empirical identification of Pareto optimal and non-optimal couple specialization. To compensate for the lack of longitudinal data, we seek to capture dynamics by analyzing time use data for three countries that represent distinct stages in the ongoing gender revolution, namely Britain, Denmark and Spain. We identify a traditional, egalitarian and unstable family equilibrium and argue that inefficient and inequitable specialization is primarily associated with the lack of clear normative guidance within unstable equilibria. The traditional equilibrium remains dominant in Spain while Denmark has advanced considerably towards an egalitarian equilibrium. In Britain, the traditional equilibrium is now marginal but no egalitarian alternative has yet emerged. Inefficiency in couple behaviour is therefore especially pronounced. Our equity analyses yield surprising results since we find more equity in Britain than in Denmark. Widespread inequity within Danish couples is almost exclusively due to women being advantaged.

We examine whether the presence of non-intact families in society is related to increased inequality in educational attainment according to social background, as suggested by the 'diverging destinies' thesis. We analyze four countries, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States, that differ in the prevalence of non-intact families and in the strength of the negative association between growing up in a non-intact family and children's educational attainment. We use a Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition approach to calculate a 'counterfactual' estimate of differences in educational attainment between socioeconomically advantaged and disadvantaged children in the hypothetical absence of non-intact families. Contrary to the diverging destinies thesis, we find little differences between actual and 'counterfactual' levels of inequality in educational attainment in all four countries. Whereas growing-up in a non-intact family affects the individual chances of educational attainment, the overall contribution of non-intact families to aggregate levels of social background inequality appears minimal.

In recent years, researchers have become increasingly interested in how the effects of parental separation on children’s educational attainment vary with social background. On the one hand, parents with more resources might be better able to prevent possible adverse events like separation to affect their children’s outcomes. On the other hand, children from higher social backgrounds might have more resources to lose from a parental separation. A wide range of empirical studies on the issue have come to inconsistent conclusions, with support found for both perspectives. The aim of this paper is to monitor the influence of methodological and operational choices on the different results observed across studies. We focus on aspects such as the operationalization of key variables, the measurement of inequality in absolute and relative terms and the different strategies used to address endogeneity. We study the effects of parental separation on educational attainment for a cohort of British children born in 1970 and find that conclusions change depending on whether social background is measured using the mother’s or father’s characteristics and whether relative or absolute differences between groups are considered. Results are relatively insensitive to the operationalization of dependent variables and the treatment of missing data. When using data from Understanding Society instead of the British Cohort Study, results also did not change. We reflect on how these findings can explain the contradictory results from earlier studies on the topic, and how heterogeneity in the effects of parental separation by socio-economic background should be interpreted.

Previous research is divided as to whether children living in same-sex parent families achieve different outcomes compared to their peers. In this paper, we improve on earlier estimates of such differences and subsequently study whether and why the association between parental union sex-composition and children's school progress changed over time. Data from the American Community Survey waves 2008-2015 (N=1,952,490 including 7,792 children living with a same-sex couple) indicates that children living with same-sex couples were more likely to be behind in school in the past, but that this association disappeared over time. Changes in socioeconomic characteristics of same-sex couples played a minor role. In 2008, it was only in areas with unfavorable laws and attitudes toward same-sex couples that children living with same-sex couples were more likely to be behind in school. This was especially the case for adopted children. In more recent periods, no effect of parental union sex composition on school progress is observed within any area or among any group studied. Based on where and when these changes took place, it is suggested that changing attitudes toward same-sex couples might have played an important role in equalizing school progress across groups.3

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