This article addresses the question of the effects of cost setting on the kind of temporal patterns optimal matching (OM) can uncover when applied to social science data. It is argued that the balance between indel (insertion and deletion) and substitution costs determines what kind of socio-temporal pattern can be brought to light. Insertion and deletion operations favor identically coded states irrespective of their locations whereas substitutions focus on contemporaneous similarities. The lower the ratio of substitution to indel costs, the closer OM is to the Hamming distance where only substitutions are used. The higher this ratio, the closer OM is to the Levenshtein II distance, which amounts to finding the longest common subsequence. When the timing of sequences is crucial, substitutions should be favored over indels and their costs should be carefully fixed. Ideally, substitution costs should vary with time to better take into account the timing of the sequences studied. As indels warp time, hence the timing of sequences, it is suggested to use only substitution operations with time-dependent costs inversely proportional to transition frequencies whenever the timing of sequences is central. This OM variant, coined dynamic Hamming matching, is applied to the question of the scheduling of paid work where timing is critical (1985 and 1999 French time use surveys, N ¼ 7,908) along with three classical OM variants (Hamming and Levenshtein I and II). As expected, the two Article 1 Corresponding Author: Laurent Lesnard, Observatoire sociologique du changement, Sciences Po, Downloaded fromHamming dissimilarity measures fare better to identify patterns of workday schedules, as measured by entropy, than the two Levenshtein ones.

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BACKGROUND Women, who generally do more unpaid and less paid work than men, have greater incentives to stay in marriages than cohabiting unions, which generally carry fewer legal protections for individuals that wish to dissolve their relationship. The extent to which cohabitation is institutionalized, however, is a matter of policy and varies substantially by country. The gender gap in paid and unpaid work between married and cohabiting individuals should be larger in countries where cohabitation is less institutionalized and where those in cohabiting relationships have relatively fewer legal protections should the relationship dissolve, yet few studies have explored this variation. OBJECTIVE Using time diary data from France, Italy, and the United States, we assess the time men and women devote to paid and unpaid work in cohabiting and married couples. These three countries provide a useful diversity in marital regimes for examining these expectations: France, where cohabitation is most “marriage like” and where partnerships can be registered and carry legal rights; the United States, where cohabitation is common but is short-lived and unstable and where legal protections vary across states; and Italy, where cohabitation is not common and where such unions are not legally acknowledged and less socially approved than in either France or the United States. RESULTS Cohabitating men’s and women’s time allocated to market and nonmarket work is generally more similar than married men and women. Our expectations about country differences are only partially borne out by the findings. Greater gender differences in the time allocated to market and nonmarket work are found in Italy relative to either France or the U.S.

This study examines family formation trajectories as a manifestation of the second demographic transition (SDT) in three countries, comparing and contrasting two post-socialist countries (Romania and the Russian Federation) with France as benchmark country advanced in the SDT. By examining combined partnership and fertility sequences and transcending the mainly descriptive nature of trajectory-based studies, the current study expands our knowledge by including key explanatory factors, such as cohort, country, and educational level. Pooled data from the Gender and Generations Survey (N = 30,197) is used to engage in sequence, optimal matching (OM), cluster and multinomial logistic regression analysis. Post-Communist cohorts are significantly more likely to engage in long-term cohabitation, childbearing within cohabitation or lone parenthood. Educational level operates differently across countries, with the highly educated in Romania and the Russian Federation less likely to follow certain de-standardized paths. Non-marital cohabitation with children is associated with lower education in all countries. Strong differences emerge between the shape and stages of the SDT in Romania and Russia, with Russians having a higher probability to experience childbearing within cohabitation, opposed to Romanians who follow childless marriage patterns or adopt postponement and singlehood. The three countries differ in their advancement in the SDT and factors shaping partnering and childbearing choices. We conclude that although the SDT remains a useful construct, it needs to be supplemented with more nuanced contextual accounts of socio-economic conditions.Cet article étudie les trajectoires de formation de la famille en tant qu'expression de la seconde transition démographique (STD) dans trois pays, comparant et contrastant deux pays postsocialistes (la Roumanie et la Fédération de Russie) avec la France, pays considéré comme référence pour son stade d'avancement dans la STD. En examinant conjointement les séquences d'union et de fécondité et en dépassant la nature essentiellement descriptive des études sur les trajectoires, cette étude inclut des facteurs explicatifs clés, tels que la cohorte, le pays, le niveau d'instruction, afin d'élargir les connaissances dans ce domaine. Des données intégrées des enquêtes Genre et Génération (N = 30.197) sont utilisées pour effectuer des analyses de séquences, d'appariement optimal, de regroupement, et de régression logistique multinomiale. Les individus appartenant aux cohortes dénommées " post-communistes " sont significativement plus susceptibles de s'engager dans des cohabitations de longue durée, d'avoir des enfants dans le cadre d'une cohabitation ou de constituer une famille monoparentale. L'impact du niveau d'instruction varie selon les pays. En Roumanie et dans la Fédération de Russie, les individus ayant les niveaux d'instruction les plus élevés sont moins susceptibles d'adopter des trajectoires plus marginales. La cohabitation sans mariage mais avec des enfants est associée à de...

We study the scheduling of work by using optimal matching analysis. We show that optimal matching can be adapted to the number of periodicities and theoretical concerns of the topic by adjusting its costs and parameters. Optimal matching is applied at two stages to define workdays and workweeks at the first and second stage respectively. There were five types of workdays and seven types of workweeks in the UK between 2000 and 2001. Standard workdays represented just over a half of workdays and standard workweeks constituted one in four workweeks. There were three types of part-time workweeks.