Large variation exists in the frequency of informal childcare provided by grandparents across Europe. At the same time, a wide North-South divide characterizes European social policies. Do welfare ...policy arrangements shape the role of grandparents? If yes, to what extent do grandparenting depend on the availability of public services offered for child care, parental leave regulation and legal obligations of family support? Combining micro-data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe and macro-indicators from the Multilinks database, this study aims to answer these questions and to further clarify the link between welfare provision and use of grandparentsí resources for working mothers. By implementing country-specific regression models, we find a clear association between the policy context of the country of residence and (daily) grandparenting.
Good estimates of HIV prevalence are important for policy makers in order to plan control programs and interventions. Although population-based surveys are now considered the "gold standard" to ...monitor the HIV epidemic, they are usually plagued by problems of nonignorable nonresponse. This paper uses the partial identification approach to assess the uncertainty caused by missing HIV status. We show how to exploit the availability of panel data and the absorbing nature of HIV infection to narrow the worst-case bounds without imposing assumptions on the missing-data mechanism. Applied to longitudinal data from rural Malawi, the Malawi Diffusion and Ideational Change Project (MDICP), our approach results in a reduction of the width of the worst-case bounds by about 18.2 percentage points in 2004, 13.2 percentage points in 2006, and 2.4 percentage points in 2008. We also use plausible instrumental variable and monotone instrumental variable restrictions to further narrow the bounds.
Although population-based surveys are now considered the "gold standard" for estimating HIV prevalence, they are usually plagued by problems of nonignorable non- response. This paper uses the partial ...identification approach to assess the uncertainty caused by missing HIV status due to unit and item nonresponse. We show how to exploit the availability of panel data and the absorbing nature of HIV infection to narrow the worst-case bounds without imposing assumptions on the missing-data mechanism. Applied to longitudinal data from rural Malawi, our approach results in a substantial reduction of the width of the worst-case bounds. We also use plausible instrumental variable and monotone instrumental variable restrictions to further narrow the bounds.
Using data from seven countries drawn from the Generations and Gender Survey, we study the relationship between informal childcare provided by grandparents and mothersí employment. The extent of ...formal childcare varies substantially across European countries and so does the role of grandparents in helping out rearing children. The extent of grandparenting also depends on their attitudes, which in turn relate to social norms and availability of public childcare, and hence the country context where individuals reside matters considerably. Within families, attitudes toward childcare are associated with attitudes towards womenís working decisions. The fact that we do not observe these attitudes may bias the estimates. By using instrumental variable techniques we find that only in some countries mothersí employment is positively and significantly associated with grandparents providing childcare. In other countries, once we control for unobserved attitudes we do not find this effect.
Although population-based surveys are now considered the "gold standard" for estimating HIV prevalence, they are usually plagued by problems of nonignorable non- response. This paper uses the partial ...identification approach to assess the uncertainty caused by missing HIV status due to unit and item nonresponse. We show how to exploit the availability of panel data and the absorbing nature of HIV infection to narrow the worst-case bounds without imposing assumptions on the missing-data mechanism. Applied to longitudinal data from rural Malawi, our approach results in a substantial reduction of the width of the worst-case bounds. We also use plausible instrumental variable and monotone instrumental variable restrictions to further narrow the bounds.
Using data from seven countries drawn from the Generations and Gender Survey, we study the relationship between informal childcare provided by grandparents and mothers’ employment. The extent of ...formal childcare varies substantially across European countries and so does the role of grandparents in helping out rearing children. The extent of grandparenting also depends on their attitudes, which in turn relate to social norms and availability of public childcare, and hence the country context where individuals reside matters considerably. Within families, attitudes toward childcare are associated with attitudes towards women’s working decisions. The fact that we do not observe these attitudes may bias the estimates. By using instrumental variable techniques we find that only in some countries mothers’ employment is positively and significantly associated with grandparents providing childcare. In other countries, once we control for unobserved attitudes we do not find this effect.
Good estimates of HIV prevalence are important for policy makers in order to plan control programs and interventions. Although population-based surveys are now considered the "gold standard" to ...monitor the HIV epidemic, they are usually plagued by problems of nonignorable nonresponse. This paper uses the partial identification approach to assess the uncertainty caused by missing HIV status. We show how to exploit the availability of panel data and the absorbing nature of HIV infection to narrow the worst-case bounds without imposing assumptions on the missing-data mechanism. Applied to longitudinal data from rural Malawi, the Malawi Diffusion and Ideational Change Project (MDICP), our approach results in a reduction of the width of the worst-case bounds by about 18.2 percentage points in 2004, 13.2 percentage points in 2006, and 2.4 percentage points in 2008. We also use plausible instrumental variable and monotone instrumental variable restrictions to further narrow the bounds.
Young people leave the parental home at different ages, and differences exist both between and within societies. To explain this heterogeneity, differences in earnings and employment, education and ...family formation are popular candidates. Comparative research has emphasised the importance of institutional arrangements, in particular the way state welfare systems are able to support young individuals in the transition to adulthood. It has been argued, however, that despite differences in welfare support, differences in social norms also play an important role. In this paper we make an attempt to explain the heterogeneity in individuals’ perceptions of the "age deadline" for leaving home. Using information from the third round of the European Social Survey (ESS) we implement a series of multi-level regression models where we account both for country and regional heterogeneity. The idea is that contextual variables may affect individuals’ perception of the age deadline, which in turn is likely to matter for the actual age of leaving home. Just as in the literature concerned with explaining actual behaviour, we find that strong normative differences between countries persist. We also find significant, though lower, regional variability in the analysis on the pooled set of European countries we have in our data set. Unemployment rate and education are found to have a strong role in explaining heterogeneity of norms at the country level, while religiosity influences age norms mostly at the regional level. This is consistent with the idea that "cultural" factors are important at the regional level while "structural" factors show their influence at the country level.
Chimie et expertise René Amalberti, Patrick Arpino, Pierre Carlotti, Pierre Charrue, Guillaume Cognon, Laurence Dujourdy, Frédéric Dupuch, Bruno Feignier, François Fontaine, Bertrand Frère, Armand Lattes, Sandrine Pereira-Rodrigues, Pauline Sibille, Gérard Sousi, Pierre Toulhoat, Patrick Touron, Bruno Vanlerberghe, Phi / Minh-Thu Dinh-Audouin, Danièle Olivier, Paul Rigny
2015
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In the traditional models of female labour supply formal childcare is assumed to be provided by the market. This is not the case in most European countries. In this paper we estimate the causal ...effect of a particular kind of informal care, the one provided by grandparents, on mothers' work decisions in Italy. We deal with the endogeneity due to mothers' and grandparents' unobserved preferences by instrumenting grandparents' help. We find that having grandparents helping with childcare increases mothers' labour market participation. The effect is particularly strong for lower educated mothers of young children, in North and Centre Italy.
