The Great Recession produced the highest rates of unemployment and foreclosure in the United States since the Great Depression. In this article the author examines the consequences of these poor ...economic conditions for fertility in the United States by estimating the effect of area-level economic conditions on state fertility in the years leading up to and including the Great Recession. The economic impacts of the Great Recession, captured by state-level economic conditions, had a strong negative effect on fertility in models with state and year fixed effects. These reductions in fertility were likely caused both by increased economic hardship and increased economic uncertainty.
Research on precarious work and its consequences overwhelmingly focuses on the economic dimension of precarity, epitomized by low wages. But the rise in precarious work also involves a major shift in ...its temporal dimension, such that many workers now experience routine instability in their work schedules. This temporal instability represents a fundamental and under-appreciated manifestation of the risk shift from firms to workers. A lack of suitable existing data, however, has precluded investigation of how precarious scheduling practices affect workers’ health and well-being. We use an innovative approach to collect survey data from a large and strategically selected segment of the U.S. workforce: hourly workers in the service sector. These data reveal that exposure to routine instability in work schedules is associated with psychological distress, poor sleep quality, and unhappiness. Low wages are also associated with these outcomes, but unstable and unpredictable schedules are much more strongly associated. Precarious schedules affect worker well-being in part through the mediating influence of household economic insecurity, yet a much larger proportion of the association is driven by work-life conflict. The temporal dimension of work is central to the experience of precarity and an important social determinant of well-being.
We consider the popular 'bounds test' for the existence of a level relationship in conditional equilibrium correction models. By estimating response surface models based on about 95 billion simulated ...F-statistics and 57 billion t-statistics, we improve upon and substantially extend the set of available critical values, covering the full range of possible sample sizes and lag orders, and allowing for any number of long-run forcing variables. By computing approximate P-values, we find that the bounds test can be easily oversized by more than 5 percentage points in small samples when using asymptotic critical values.
In this article I argue that so-called light essays on apparently trivial items as they were published in periodicals of the early 20th century use the specificities of the essay genre to unveil ...dimensions of everyday life that are often taken for granted and thus overlooked. I will focus on two thing-essays – G. K. Chesterton’s “Lamp-Posts” (1920) and Rose Macaulay’s “Arm-Chair” (1935) – and argue that these essays help an emerging mass reader- and consumership to establish semantic coherence between themselves and the proliferating objects around them. Using Martin Heidegger’s and Bill Brown’s object-thing-distinction, I will also argue that these essays point to the relevance of everyday life and to the political issues that are sometimes manifest in everyday items. In particular, Chesterton’s and Macaulay’s thing-essays use the semantic flexibility of things to illustrate and defend their political, religious and intellectual views, touching on fields such as distributism, Catholicism and the so-called battle of the brows.
The Causal Effects of Father Absence McLanahan, Sara; Tach, Laura; Schneider, Daniel
Annual review of sociology,
01/2013, Volume:
39, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The literature on father absence is frequently criticized for its use of cross-sectional data and methods that fail to take account of possible omitted variable bias and reverse causality. We review ...studies that have responded to this critique by employing a variety of innovative research designs to identify the causal effect of father absence, including studies using lagged dependent variable models, growth curve models, individual fixed effects models, sibling fixed effects models, natural experiments, and propensity score matching models. Our assessment is that studies using more rigorous designs continue to find negative effects of father absence on offspring well-being, although the magnitude of these effects is smaller than what is found using traditional cross-sectional designs. The evidence is strongest and most consistent for outcomes such as high school graduation, children's social-emotional adjustment, and adult mental health.
Historic increases in income inequality have coincided with widening class divides in parental investments of money and time in children. These widening class gaps are significant because parental ...investment is one pathway by which advantage is transmitted across generations. Using over three decades of micro-data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey and the American Heritage Time Use Survey linked to state-year measures of income inequality, we test the relationship between income inequality and class gaps in parental investment. We find robust evidence of wider class gaps in parental financial investments in children—but not parental time investments in children—when state-level income inequality is higher. We explore mechanisms that may drive the relationship between rising income inequality and widening class gaps in parental financial investments in children. This relationship is partially explained by the increasing concentration of income at the top of the income distribution in state-years with higher inequality, which gives higher-earning households more money to spend on financial investments in children. In addition, we find evidence for contextual effects of higher income inequality that reshape parental preferences toward financial investment in children differentially by class.
Background:
Injury to the ipsilateral graft used for reconstruction of the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) or a new injury to the contralateral ACL are disastrous outcomes after successful ACL ...reconstruction (ACLR), rehabilitation, and return to activity. Studies reporting ACL reinjury rates in younger active populations are emerging in the literature, but these data have not yet been comprehensively synthesized.
Purpose:
To provide a current review of the literature to evaluate age and activity level as the primary risk factors in reinjury after ACLR.
Study Design:
Systematic review and meta-analysis.
Methods:
A systematic review of the literature was conducted via searches in PubMed (1966 to July 2015) and EBSCO host (CINAHL, Medline, SPORTDiscus 1987 to July 2015). After the search and consultation with experts and rating of study quality, 19 articles met inclusion for review and aggregation. Population demographic data and total reinjury (ipsilateral and contralateral) rate data were recorded from each individual study and combined using random-effects meta-analyses. Separate meta-analyses were conducted for the total population data as well as the following subsets: young age, return to sport, and young age + return to sport.
Results:
Overall, the total second ACL reinjury rate was 15%, with an ipsilateral reinjury rate of 7% and contralateral injury rate of 8%. The secondary ACL injury rate (ipsilateral + contralateral) for patients younger than 25 years was 21%. The secondary ACL injury rate for athletes who return to a sport was also 20%. Combining these risk factors, athletes younger than 25 years who return to sport have a secondary ACL injury rate of 23%.
Conclusion:
This systematic review and meta-analysis demonstrates that younger age and a return to high level of activity are salient factors associated with secondary ACL injury. These combined data indicate that nearly 1 in 4 young athletic patients who sustain an ACL injury and return to high-risk sport will go on to sustain another ACL injury at some point in their career, and they will likely sustain it early in the return-to-play period. The high rate of secondary injury in young athletes who return to sport after ACLR equates to a 30 to 40 times greater risk of an ACL injury compared with uninjured adolescents. These data indicate that activity modification, improved rehabilitation and return-to-play guidelines, and the use of integrative neuromuscular training may help athletes more safely reintegrate into sport and reduce second injury in this at-risk population.
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