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The aim of this paper is to identify the sources of time use differences between married and cohabiting couples and to answer the question whether there is a "selection into specialization", i.e. whether cohabiting partners who agree on a (traditional) division of work simply have a higher probability of getting married. In a non-parametric matching approach, we compare couples who get married in the German SocioEconomic Panel between 1991 and 2008 with couples who remain cohabiters. Taking the potential selection into marriage into account, differences in the intra-couple division of market work and child care are considerably reduced by 54 to 66 percent. Thus, couples who anticipate specialization in time use (and its corresponding economic advantages) seem to pre-select into formal marriage. However, remaining differences in time use leave sufficient scope for an additional specializationreinforcing effect of the institutional framework of marriage in Germany, particularly for the subsample of couples who become parents.

This work examines the validity of the two main assumptions of relative risk-aversion models of educational inequality. We compare the Breen-Goldthorpe (BG) and the Breen-Yaish (BY) models in terms of their assumptions about status maintenance motives and beliefs about the occupational risks associated with educational decisions. Concerning the first assumption, our contribution is threefold. First, we criticise the assumption of the BG model that families aim only at avoiding downward mobility and are insensitive to the prospects of upward mobility. We argue that the loss-aversion assumption proposed by BY is a more realistic formulation of status-maintenance motives. Second, we propose and implement a novel empirical approach to assess the validity of the loss-aversion assumption. Third, we present empirical results based on a sample of families of lower secondary school leavers indicating that families are sensitive to the prospects of both upward and downward mobility, and that the loss-aversion hypothesis of BY is empirically supported. As regards the risky choice assumption, we argue that families may not believe that more ambitious educational options entail occupational risks relative to less ambitious ones. We present empirical evidence indicating that, in France, the academic path is not perceived as a risky option. We conclude that, if the restrictive assumptions of the BG model are removed, relative-risk aversion needs not drive educational inequalities.

If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -Empirical research has unambiguously shown that married men receive higher wages than unmarried, whereas a wage premium for cohabiters is not as evident yet. This paper aims to exploit the observed difference between the marital and the cohabiting wage premium in Germany to draw conclusions about the sources, typically explained by specialisation (e.g. husbands being more productive because their wives take over household chores) or selection (high earnings potentials being more attractive on the marriage market). Design/methodology/approach -The paper analyzes the cohabiting and the marital wage premium in Germany using a shifting panel design for marriages and move-ins from 1993 to 2004 in the German Socio-Economic Panel. With non-parametric matching models men who get married (treatment group I) are matched with cohabiting respectively single men (control groups) and men who move in with a partner (treatment group II) with singles. Findings -Matching reveals that higher wages are mostly due to positive selection -into marriage as well as into cohabitation. Supplementary analysis of intra-household time use suggests that specialization, if any, is part of the selection process from single to cohabitation to marriage. Originality/value -This is the first application of non-parametric matching in a comparative study of the marital and the cohabiting wage premium and thus provides new insights into their respective sources. It is also the first investigation of family-status-related wage premiums in Germany.

This article investigates the extent to which parental values differ between social groups in the UK at the start of the twenty‐first century. The study of parental values is an important area of sociological enquiry that can inform scholarship from across the social sciences concerned with educational inequality and cultural variability in family life. We draw on data from the Millennium Cohort Study to show how parent’s social class, religion, religiosity, race and ethnicity, and education are related to the qualities they would like their children to have. Our rank‐ordered regression models show that parents in service class occupations place significantly more importance on ‘thinking for self’ than ‘obey parents’ compared to those in routine manual occupations. We also show that although class matters, the relationship between education and parental values is particularly strong. Parenting values also differ by parental racial and ethnic background and by levels of religiosity.

Why are middle-class parents more involved in school than working-class parents?

This paper analyses the impact of social class on families' and teachers' decisionmaking within an institutionalized family-school dialogue in France. The dialogue decides which upper secondary school track a student will attend and consists of three main steps: (i) family's school track request, (ii) staff meeting's subsequent school track proposition, and (iii) family's optional rejection of the staff's proposition. Using national longitudinal data, Ifind that parents' cultural capital importantly mediates secondary effects (i.e. social class effects that remain after controlling for school performance) on families' requests and their rejections of staffs' propositions. Social class effects on staffs' propositions are accounted for by families' requests and student school performance. Moreover families and teachers appear to choose grade retention to avoid enrolment in a lower track.

This article analyses the association between social class and parent-initiated contact with teachers. Hypotheses are derived from Lareau's theory on 'concerted cultivation' and status maintenance theory on rational educational decision-making. Data from a national survey on French students traversing secondary school are used to study social class differentials in parents' involvement in Grade 9 when students are about to proceed to an important transition from lower to upper secondary school. Linear probability models reveal that the likelihood that parents initiate meetings with the teachers decreases as student's performance increases and that concerted cultivation beliefs have positive effects.Through inclusion of interaction terms into the models, clear evidence is provided that middle-class parents are more likely to seek a meeting than working-class parents when their children face difficulties.