College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
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Item DOES WOMEN'S CONTINUATION IN THE LABOR FORCE MATTER FOR UNION FORMATION? AN ASSESSMENT OF EVIDENCE FROM THE UNITED STATES AND LATIN AMERICA.(2024) Hurtado, Constanza; Sayer, Liana C.; Caudillo, Mónica L.; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Social scientists have long been interested in the interplay between women’s roles as paid employees, partners and mothers. One of the first puzzles they intended to solve was about the consequences of women’s participation in the labor force for marriage. Currently, evidence about high-income Western countries overwhelming supports that women’s employment does not hinder union formation generally or marriage specifically. This conclusion is consistent when looking at multiple dimensions of employment, including earnings, employment status, economic potential, and job quality. Women’s employment engagement during the transition to adulthood have received scarce attention as a determinant of whether and when women move in with a romantic partner for the first time. In particular, and despite its relevance to understanding family-work dynamics across life, the relationship between continuous employment, the number of years employed without breaks/interruptions, and union formation has been overlooked. Additionally, despite increasing rates of women’s participation in the labor force and drastic sociodemographic changes in the last decades, the association between women’s employment and union formation in Latin American countries has been scarcely examined. To address these two gaps in the existing literature, this dissertation analyzes whether—and how—employment engagement influences women’s transitions into their first unions. Specifically, I measure and compare two dimensions of employment during the transition to adulthood: 1) the number of cumulative years/months of employment, and 2) the number of years/months of continuous employment. For this purpose, I analyze three nationally representative longitudinal and retrospective datasets, and focus on the experiences of women born in the 1970s or later in Mexico, Chile, and the U.S. The results confirm the relevance of women’s employment engagement on decisions toward moving in with a romantic partner for the first time, highlighting differences between the two employment dimensions, as well as between contexts. By contrasting cumulative and continuous employment, the dissertation contributes to our understanding of why and how women’s employment shapes union formation. It also invites us to expand theories about the interplay between women’s economic position and family from a comparative perspective. Given the increasing uncertainty of labor markets, it also motivates further exploration about the role of expectations and experiences of continuous employment on family transitions.Item Essays in the Economics of Immigration(2023) Soriano, John Joseph Sanchez; Hellerstein, Judith K; Pope, Nolan G; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Chapter 1 sets the stage for Chapters 2 and 3, which involves the empirical analyses of the effects of two prominent immigration policies: Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). This chapter begins with a review of the history of modern US immigration policy and relevant empirical evidence regarding it. It then focuses on three special topics: immigration and labor markets, immigration and crime, and the effects of enforcement policy. These topics are chosen for their contextual relevance for DACA and IRCA, as well as for marriage. Chapter 2 examines the impact of Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals (DACA) on the marriage outcomes of its recipients. DACA, an immigration policy introduced by President Barack Obama in 2012, provides temporary benefits to unauthorized immigrants who arrived in the US as children. By analyzing data from the American Community Survey (ACS), the study examines the effects of DACA eligibility on the probability of being married and the types of individuals DACA recipients marry. The findings suggest that DACA eligibility increased the likelihood of marriage by approximately 2 percentage points, with deportation relief being a key driver for women and work authorization playing a more prominent role for men. The analysis also reveals that DACA recipients are more inclined to marry US natives, emphasizing the desire for assimilation, and tend to choose spouses who are fluent in English, indicating the influence of DACA on language-related assimilation. Chapter 3 investigates the impact of the legalization provision of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) on marriage rates. The IRCA offered a pathway to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants. Using data on unauthorized immigrants that were legalized under the IRCA from the Legalized Population Survey (LPS) and a comparison group of US natives from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), the study implements an individual fixed effects strategy to estimate the changes in marriage rates as a result of the IRCA legalization. The findings reveal a statistically and economically significant increase in marriage rates for both men and women following IRCA legalization. Men experienced a 6.51 percentage point increase, while women saw an 8.29 percentage point increase. Unlike the effects observed in Chapter 2 for DACA, the permanent nature of the IRCA contributed to a stronger impact on marriage rates. The study explores potential mechanisms but finds inconclusive evidence regarding labor market outcomes and education as drivers of the marriage effect resulting from immigration liberalization.Item The Causality and Characterization of the Widowhood Effect(2006-08-04) Espinosa, Javier; Evans, William; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Researchers from a variety of fields have noted a sharp rise in mortality for widows soon after the death of their spouse, a relationship that has often been called the widowhood effect. Because of assortative mating, married couples tend to share many of the same lifestyle characteristics, so this result may reflect correlation rather than a causal relationship. In this dissertation, I attempt to decipher whether the widowhood effect reflects a causal relationship. The key innovation in the dissertation turns on the notion that some causes of death reveal more information about the surviving spouse than others. In the extreme, if a cause of death was randomly assigned, then these types of deaths could be used to identify the death of a spouse does in fact raise mortality of the surviving spouse. In practice, we cannot specify what causes of death are randomly assigned, but instead, we can identify those that are uncorrelated with observed characteristics. Specifically, I use data from the National Longitudinal Mortality Survey and the National Health Interview Survey Multiple Cause of Death supplement to create longitudinal datasets of married couples, aged 50 to 70. I initially use this sample to identify those causes of death that are predicted by socio-economic status (income, occupation and education) and those that are not. I refer to these two types of deaths as informative and uninformative causes of death, respectively. If the heightened mortality of surviving spouses is subject to an omitted variables bias, in single-equation models, I should find a greater excess mortality for informative deaths than for uninformative ones. If omitted variable bias is not a serious concern, I should see little difference between the two types of widows. In Cox proportional hazard models, I find for men the death of a spouse from an uninformative cause has only a slightly smaller impact on mortality than a death from an informative cause. The findings suggest a 30 percent increase in male mortality as a direct result of becoming a widow. I do not find similar evidence for women; in fact, the results show no marriage protection effect.Item Modernization, Life Course, and Marriage Timing in Indonesia(2005-12-06) Sundaram, Aparna; Vanneman, Reeve; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Past research on marriage timing in Asia has found the modernization framework to be insufficient for explaining and understanding the processes of marriage and non-marriage. Using insights provided by research on marriage timing in Western societies, we examine the determinants of marriage and non-marriage for Indonesian men and women using the 1993 and 1997 waves of the Indonesian Family Life Survey dataset. Using a logit and a hierarchical model we examine the characteristics of unmarried men and women at time 1 who had married by time 2. We find that the basic correlates of the process of industrialization - education and work-force participation have counter-intuitive associations with marriage. While level of education does nothing to delay marriage, being enrolled in school keeps people away from marriage. Work force participation in contrast increases the odds of people's marriage while earnings from work have no effect. Based on our results we argue that the processes of marriage and non-marriage are best understood using a life course perspective. The life course perspective examines how the social context that people live in influences their lives, and determines their life trajectories, and the choices they make. Seen from this perspective, events such as marriage are a part of a person's life course that follows a normative sequence. People get married at that stage in their life when they are considered ready for it. When they are in school they are viewed as minors who are not suited to starting and raising a family whereas people who are working are viewed as adults who have the stability to take on the responsibilities of a married life.