http://hdl.handle.net/1903/2273 2013-05-20T21:50:02Z 2013-05-20T21:50:02Z Banerji, Manjistha http://hdl.handle.net/1903/13846 2013-04-05T02:33:37Z 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: "Fertility as Mobility" in India: Salience of Caste, Education and Employment Opportunities Authors: Banerji, Manjistha Abstract: In this dissertation, we use the "fertility as mobility" approach to study the determinants of fertility outcomes in India. More elaborately, we re- examine the Beckerian hypothesis of a tradeoff between number and quality of children with increasing income levels using the India Human Development Survey (2005) data. Our contention is that it is not necessarily the case that couples at higher end of the income scale will have fewer but higher quality children as compared to those lower down the income scale. Drawing on the seminal work of Susan Greenhalgh on "fertility as mobility" in late nineteenth century traditional Chinese society (1989) and modifying Coale's three necessary and sufficient conditions for demographic transition (1975), we argue that even couples lower down the income scale will be willing to invest in quality rather than quantity of children if the institutional framework in terms of education and employment opportunities enhance mobility prospects. We also find considerable persistence of occupations across generations suggesting that increasing occupational mobility across generations particularly for those lower down the caste hierarchy is essential for mobility to be a relevant factor in fertility decisions for disenfranchised castes.

2012-01-01T00:00:00Z Lee, Chang Won http://hdl.handle.net/1903/13649 2013-02-08T03:47:39Z 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: More than human capital: Global social mobility and categorical inequality among South Koreans Authors: Lee, Chang Won Abstract: Social scientists in the modernization school argue that industrialization and modernization lead societies to be "open" societies characterized by equal opportunities and a central importance of individual efforts and achievements in social mobility. They assume, using nation-states as the unit of analysis, that stratification takes place primarily and exclusively within nations. This study, by contrast, perceives stratification and social mobility as processes taking place globally. Shifting its focus from national dimensions to global and transnational dimensions, this study investigates the global social mobility of South Koreans, including Korean immigrants in the United States. This study situates income earnings and social mobility of non-migrant South Koreans and Korean immigrants in the United States within broader patterns of transnational and global social mobility, and reassesses the relative weight of categorical attributes (e.g. country) with that of human capitals (e.g. college education). The results suggest that how social stratification, despite the modernization of South Korea and the United States, remains shaped by categorical inequalities. In this sense, achievement and ascription, as criteria of selection, continue to be fundamental to global stratification. The role of achievement is far more modest than usually assumed when compared to the continuing impact of categorical attributes such as race/ethnicity and nationality.

2012-01-01T00:00:00Z Thorn, Elizabeth Kathleen http://hdl.handle.net/1903/13635 2013-02-08T03:42:22Z 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Mothers' Transitions to the Empty Nest Phase Authors: Thorn, Elizabeth Kathleen Abstract: Much of the sociological research on women as mothers focuses on the transition into motherhood or the work and pleasure of raising children. This dissertation uses mixed methods to examine a rarely studied aspect of motherhood - the transition out of day-to-day parenting and into the empty nest stage of the life course. Three very different data sources and analysis techniques are used to develop a rich understanding of how women's daily routines are affected by this transition, as well as what these changes mean to the individual women going through them. The first analytic component draws on time diary data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) to explore two transitions - the initial transition into motherhood and the gradual changes that occur as children grow. This analysis focuses on labor force engagement, care work, and leisure activities of women as they move through the childrearing years. The second analysis, based on a series of 12 in-depth interviews with women whose children have recently left home, concentrates on the perceived meaning of the transition into the empty nest phase. New sources of meaningful activity and the effect of this transition on women's relationships are also described. In the third substantive section, longitudinal data from the National Longitudinal Survey-Young Women (NLS-YW) are used to investigate differences in labor force, helping work, and psychological well-being outcomes between empty nest mothers, mothers with young adult children living at home, mothers with adolescent children living at home, and women without children. Together, these three analyses paint a picture of the transition into the empty nest as one dominated by emotional changes - lower levels of depressive symptoms, new feelings of freedom, and changes in relationships. While some evidence of new activity was found, especially among the women interviewed for the qualitative analysis, the transition to the empty nest is not typically associated with substantial changes in labor force engagement or other activities.

2012-01-01T00:00:00Z Daczo, Zsuzsa http://hdl.handle.net/1903/13259 2012-10-12T02:35:02Z 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Wage Inequality and the Gender Wage Gap: Are American Women Swimming Upstream? Authors: Daczo, Zsuzsa Abstract: Since the 1970s wage inequality has been growing in the United States, yet another measure of inequality, the difference between women's and men's mean wages, has been declining. Some argue that the gender wage gap would have decreased even more, had overall wage inequality not grown. According to these researchers, the increasing dispersion of wages pushed women's mean wage further away from men's, so women had to swim upstream to reduce the gender wage gap. This reasoning makes intuitive sense: as wage inequality increases, the disadvantage of those who earn below the average wage worsens, and the gain of those who earn above the average increases. Given that the proportion of women who earn below the overall mean wage is greater than that of men, when wages become more dispersed, women's mean wage should fall further behind that of men. However, the female wage dispersion is different from the male one, and has undergone a different transformation, as men and women operate in different labor markets. Relatively low-skilled men suffered the biggest decline in wages during the 1970s and 1980s, and as their wages fell, wage inequality among men increased. As growing wage inequality among men meant lower male wages, it led to a narrowing of the gender wage gap, so women did not have to swim against a current. Since the 1990s, however, the wages of low-skilled men stagnated, and the highest male wages grew even higher, so the gender wage conversion slowed down, because women's wages had to catch up with a moving target. My dissertation will make an important contribution by offering an explanation for the slowdown in gender convergence. It also offers an alternative solution to a methodological problem. The statistical method currently used to calculate the effect of inequality on the gender pay gap assumes that there is only one wage structure, and miscalculates the relationship between wage structure and gender pay gap. This dissertation introduces a new method, which takes into account gender differences in wage distribution.

2012-01-01T00:00:00Z