Family

Despite some convergence, the gender pay gap remains large. In this study, we use BHPS-USoc data to document the evolution of the gender pay gap in the UK over the past 25 years and its association with fertility. We also investigate the potential role of various differences in career patterns between men and women and how they change with the arrival of the rst child.

Since the 1970s, many countries have established free or highly subsidized education for all preschool children in the hope of improving children’s learning and socio-economic life chances and encouraging mothers to join the labor force. Evaluations reveal that these policies can increase maternal employment in the short term and may continue to do so even after the child is no longer in preschool by enabling mothers to gain more job skills and increase their attachment to the labor force. However, their effectiveness depends on the policy design, the country context, and the characteristics of mothers of preschoolers.

Expanding access to pre-school education and childcare services has been a key policy on the agenda of many governments for over 30 years. Several motivations have been at the heart of these policies.

Using recall and diary food expenditure data from Canada, we compare estimates of the household size elasticity of per capita food expenditure.

There is substantial evidence of a significant relationship between parents’ income and sons’ earnings in the UK, and that this relationship has strengthened over time. We extend this by exploring a broader measure of net family income as an outcome.

Objectives: To extend research on workforce participation beyond age 50 by describing entire employment histories in later life and testing their links to prior life course conditions.

We study the transmission of risk attitudes in a unique survey of mothers and children in which both participated in an incentivized risk preference elicitation task.

Many governments are considering expanding childcare subsidies, but little is known about the impact of such policies on parent’s labour supply. Exploiting free childcare eligibility rules based on date of birth in a difference-in-differences framework, we compare the effects of offering free part-time childcare and of expanding this offer to the whole school day. Free part-time childcare only affects the labour force participation of mothers whose youngest child is eligible. Expanding from part-time to full-time free childcare leads to significant increases in labour force participation and employment of these mothers, which emerge immediately and grow over the months following entitlement.

The success of universal preschool education depends crucially on the policy parameters and specific country context.

This briefing note is the first output in a programme of work seeking to understand the gender wage gap and its relationship to poverty. Section 1 sets out what we mean by the gender wage gap, how it differs according to education level and how it has evolved over time and across generations. Section 2 provides some descriptive evidence on how the gender wage gap relates to the presence of dependent children and the employment outcomes associated with that.

BACKGROUND: Parenting style is associated with offspring health, but whether it is associated with offspring mortality at older ages remains unknown.

We conducted a retrospective study of breast feeding in the years 2005 and 2010, comparing breast feeding incidence rates by day of week of birth.

This paper deals with the relationship between family formation and employment in older cohorts of the English population born between 1916 and 1957. Based on retrospective life history data of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) and using sequence and cluster analyses, we explore three dimensions in particular: employment, marital status, and having children, and the extent to which individuals’ life course trajectories on these three dimensions vary across cohorts, gender, and level of education. While the majority of men followed a trajectory of marriage and family formation with a (relatively) continuous career, the family-work trajectories of women varied noticeably from one cohort to the next, including increased labour market participation combined with fewer and shorter breaks from work to care for children. While the current perception is that the so-called ‘baby boomer’ generation born soon after World War Two was path-breaking in terms of life course innovations, our findings are not compatible with the assumption of a single cohort being particularly pioneering.

Identifying sibling influence on teenage substance behavior

We investigate the impact of inheritances and gifts received on the distribution of wealth. Whereas previous work has looked only at marketable wealth, we consider broader measures of wealth including state and private pensions.

This note summarises the results of two related research projects. With funding from the ESRC through its Secondary Data Analysis Initiative, and the Nuffield Foundation, Jo Blanden (University of Surrey), Emilia Del Bono (University of Essex), Kirstine Hansen (Institute of Education), Sandra McNally (University of Surrey) and Birgitta Rabe (University of Essex) investigated the impact of free early education on children’s development.

This report estimates the impact of free, universal pre-school education for three year olds on maternal labour supply in England.

Early childhood investments substantially boost adult health