Leen Vandecasteele

Although it is well established that parenthood affects employment decisions within households, less is known about how this effect varies across couple types in different countries. Using difference-in-differences analysis with propensity score matching and multilevel modeling with cross-level interactions, this study explores heterogeneity in the effect of parenthood on couples’ division of paid labor by prebirth relative earning power in different European contexts. The results show that the decline in the female share of couples’ paid working hours after parenthood is stronger in male main-earner couples than in equal-earner or female main-earner couples. Our cross-national findings demonstrate that institutional and cultural factors influence couples’ postparenthood employment arrangements, with the magnitude of these moderating effects dependent on the couple's prebirth relative earning pattern. Longer paid maternity and family leave for mothers exacerbates the parenthood effect on couples’ division of paid labor, whereas greater childcare provision weakens this effect. However, these policy impacts are observed only among male main-earner couples, which can be attributed to differences in opportunity costs and bargaining power across couple types. Egalitarian gender norms weaken the effect of parenthood on the paid labor division between partners regardless of the breadwinner couple type before childbirth.

We investigate how unemployment insurance generosity impacts reemployment and economic precarity by family type. With Swiss longitudinal administrative data and a regression discontinuity design using potential benefit duration, we examine differences between single households and primary and secondary or equal earners, as well as differences by gender and presence of children. Less generous unemployment insurance (shorter potential benefit duration) speeds up reemployment for all family types during the period with benefit cuts whereas longer-term effects are stronger for single households, secondary and equal earners, and those without children. Economic precarity increases for singles, single-parents, and primary earners during the period with lower benefits though there are no long-term effects. We argue that those with higher financial responsibility (i.e., primary earners or those with children) face pressure to find jobs irrespective of benefit generosity whereas those with lower financial responsibility (i.e., secondary or equal earners and those without children) have more capacity to react.

Meso-level contexts (e.g., neighbourhood or community contexts) have a profound influence on vulnerability trajectories. They may mediate, mitigate, or reinforce the impact of variables such as gender, age or social class. This chapter studies how meso-level economic factors cushion or worsen the negative effects of adverse circumstances on people’s socio-economic trajectories, health outcomes, or political attitudes. This chapter showcases four case studies, which show: (1) that meso-level labour market contexts can alter the size of the penalties associated with low levels of educational attainment or a more disadvantaged background for young people seeking employment for the first time; (2) that meso-level social networks act as multipliers of inequality; close social ties in the neighbourhood increase the probability of exiting unemployment in resourceful neighbourhoods, whereas they decrease the probability of unemployment exits in deprived neighbourhoods; (3) that people residing in locations with higher levels of income inequality perceive others as being more competitive, which produces paradoxical effects on their self-rated health and undermines the psychological health of the most economically vulnerable; (4) how the confrontation with meso-level inequality and diversity shapes people’s beliefs in meritocracy and examine how everyday experiences of local inequality reinforces or weakens people’s belief in meritocratic value.

We use representative longitudinal panel data from the Dutch European Values Survey (EVS) to study whether the COVID‐19 pandemic shifted opinions about how a woman's full‐time employment impacts family life. The data was collected before the COVID‐19 pandemic in 2017 and in May 2020. The analysis focuses on groups whose unpaid and paid work situation changed abruptly with the COVID‐19 pandemic: parents with coresident children, and those who experienced a change in paid workload that clashes with traditional gender role expectations, namely women whose workload increased and men whose workload decreased or who stopped working. We found that groups that faced an abrupt change in their paid and unpaid work routines that clashed with their previously held gender attitude changed their gender attitude in alignment with the new paid or unpaid work situation. For women in couple households with children, this meant that they saw a halt in their progression toward gender egalitarian attitudes. For those who experienced a change in paid workload that clashes with traditional gender role norms, it meant stronger progression toward gender egalitarian attitudes. The results are interpreted on the basis of cognitive dissonance theory and exposure theory and placed in the context of previous findings.

This article assesses the gendered impact of COVID‐19 measures on changes in time that Swiss dual earner couples spent on unpaid work during the pandemic, focusing on families with children. Overcoming some of the methodological shortcomings of previous studies, high‐quality representative panel data allow us to examine the change in time invested in housework and childcare before and during the pandemic, and test theoretical assumptions as to the mechanisms underlying the observed patterns. Gender inequalities are explained by the couple's work division prior to, and at the onset of, the pandemic and interpreted in the light of key theoretical approaches (economics of the family, bargaining and time availability, doing gender). Our results imply that in particular changes in the time availability of the partner are relevant for changes in time spent on housework, while in case of care work, the own time availability matters more. Moreover, we also found that the respondents' economic bargaining power within the couple matters both for housework and care work. Finally, the implemented COVID‐19 measures neither led to an increase in patriarchal power structures nor did they foster an increase in equality for unpaid work among women and men. Instead, the results show that changes in time availability due to short‐time, remote or overtime working schemes determined changes in time spent on unpaid care to a larger extent than gender alone.

Some participants of the public debate have argued that the world before and after the coronavirus crisis will look fundamentally different. An underlying assumption is that this crisis will alter public opinion in such a way that it leads to profound societal and political change. Scholarship suggests that while some policy preferences are quite volatile and prone to change under the influence of crises, core values formed during childhood are likely to remain stable. In this article, we test stability or change of a well-selected set of opinions and values before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. We rely on a unique longitudinal panel study whereby the Dutch fieldwork of the European Values Study 2017 web survey serves as a baseline; respondents were re-approached in May 2020. The findings indicate that values remain largely stable. However, there is an increase in political support, confirming the so-called rally effect. We conclude our manuscript with a response to the futurists expecting changes in public opinion because of the coronavirus crisis.

We bring together research on social networks and neighbourhood disadvantage to examine how they jointly affect unemployed individuals’ probability of re-entering employment. Data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study ‘Understanding Society’ provide information on the proportion of friends who live in the same neighbourhood, and are linked with small-scale administrative information on neighborhood employment deprivation. Results indicate that neighbourhood employment deprivation prolongs unemployment, but only for individuals who report that all of their friends live in the same neighbourhood. Living in an advantaged neighbourhood with all of one’s friends in the neighbourhood increases the chances of exiting unemployment. In contrast, neighbourhood location is not associated with unemployment exit if one’s friends do not live in the same neighbourhood. We conclude that neighbourhood effects on exiting unemployment critically depend on individuals’ social embeddedness in the neighbourhood. Not just residing in a disadvantaged neighbourhood, but actually living there with all one’s friends, prevents individuals from re-entering employment. This opens new avenues for theorising neighbourhood effects as social rather than geographic phenomena, and highlights that the effects of neighbourhood socio-economic characteristics are conditional on the level of interaction residents have within their neighbourhood.

This chapter highlights the potential of a longitudinal approach to gain better insight into the dynamic patterns of working poverty. While cross-sectional research can show us the characteristics of people at risk of in-work poverty, it cannot show us how transitory or persistent in-work poverty is. A longitudinal approach can further our insight by showing the duration of in-work poverty, the typical sequence of events leading to working poverty and the patterns of exit from in-work poverty. It can furthermore show us which population groups are at risk of persistent working poverty, and how episodes of working poverty are embedded in the life course. The authors start this chapter by highlighting the advantages of a longitudinal approach to working poverty. They then review the existing research evidence on dynamic approaches to poverty and employment, before introducing the research design needed to study dynamics of working poverty. This includes a discussion of the type of data necessary (socio-economic household panel data), as well as a brief overview of the relevant analysis techniques. The chapter then includes empirical examples of the dynamics of in-work poverty.

While economic downturns have adverse effects on young people's life chances, empirical studies examining whether and to what extent human values, social attitudes and well‐being indicators respond to sudden economic shocks are scarce. To assess the claim that human values are less affected by economic shocks than social attitudes and well‐being, two distinct yet related studies based on the European Social Survey (ESS) are conducted. The first employs a fixed effects pseudo‐panel analysis of the 2008–2014 ESS‐waves to detect whether changes over time in the socio‐demographic group's unemployment risk and national youth unemployment affect individual dispositions to varying degrees. The second study captures micro‐ and cross‐national effects in the 2010 ESS cross‐section. Unique for this set‐up is that we can test whether the findings hold for over‐time changes in youth unemployment within countries (pseudo‐panel), as well as for cross‐country differences in youth unemployment (multilevel). Both studies indicate that political trust, satisfaction with the economy and subjective well‐being are lowered by economic risk and hardship, while social trust and self‐rated health are less affected by changes in youth unemployment. Secondly, human values are immune to economic risk, underscoring that values transcend specific situations and are therefore resistant against sudden economic shocks.