The article explores the extent to which the organization of vocational tracks in upper secondary school affects the labour market risks associated with early school exit. The Nordic countries share many features, but the upper secondary school systems differ significantly in how their vocational tracks are organized. Denmark and Norway have dual vocational tracks, that is, they combine school-based education and workplace apprenticeships, whereas in Finland and Sweden they are primarily school based. We analyse administrative longitudinal data from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s in the four countries and find the highest vocational track dropout rates in Norway and the lowest in Finland. The results indicate that the relative labour market effect of dropping out from a vocational track is most detrimental in Norway. It is also in Norway that we find the greatest gender differences in this respect.
While considerable research exists on US immigrant groups living in extended households, little is available on such households in Europe. Using a combination of register data, survey data and qualitative interview data, this article analyzes extended household living among Turkish immigrants in Denmark, and compares the findings to the situation in Turkey. The analysis shows that as many as 78% of young female and 38% of young male marriage migrants began life in Denmark in extended households in the late 1990’s. However, these figures dropped by approximately one-third over the first five years of married life in Denmark. Another finding is that the share of Turkish males in Denmark who moved into extended households with their brides’ parents is far greater than the share of their counterparts doing so in Turkey. Thus matrilineal extended household living is much more common in a migratory context than in a non-migratory one. Using qualitative interview data, the article also explores how both gender and life cycle stage affect extended household living arrangements, and shows that women in particular may be strongly affected. The effects can be a positively perceived support for child care and household work, but may also be a negatively perceived confinement to domesticity. The confinement to domesticity is partly achieved through a pooling of household income that allows young women to remain outside the labor force. While many young couples move to nuclear living after some years in Denmark, a number of extended families continue cohabiting for decades.
Social assistance benefits are the last resort in national social protection systems, and decentralizing reforms leading to increasing local discretion over implementation of national legislation was an international trend frequently referred to as devolution. More recent reforms have instead often implied recentralization and/or involved mandatory institutional cooperation between welfare agencies located at different hierarchical levels. In contrast to North America, there is little European evidence on the extent to which shifting responsibilities influence benefit levels and benefit receipt. Using individual level register data from Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden and applying a difference-in-difference approach, we link changes in legislation to changes in municipal benefits as well as caseloads during the period 1990–2010. We only find indications of reform effects linked to distinct benefit centralization, concluding that other reforms were too insubstantial to have an impact. Combined with earlier evidence, this suggests that in order to have an impact, welfare reform requires marked changes in authority.
Using a mixed methods approach, this article examines gendered patterns of employment and of unemployment benefit uptake among Turkish marriage migrants in Denmark. The results show that men use co‐ethnic networks to access entry positions. Subsequent eligibility for unemployment benefits enable these men to search for better jobs. Women enter employment more slowly and tell of such entry being related to entering the unemployment insurance system, enabling them to periodically conform to gendered expectations as homemakers. Pakistani marriage migrants display similar patterns, indicating the centrality of this institutional arrangement in low‐skilled marriage migrants’ active adaptation to a new society.
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