Gendered Parenthood-Employment Gaps from Midlife: A Demographic Perspective Across Three Different Welfare Systems.

Women's labor force participation has increased in Western countries, but gender gaps remain, especially among parents. Using a novel comparative perspective, we assess women's and men's employment trajectories from midlife onward by parity and education. We provide insights into the gendered parenthood-employment gaps examining the long-term implications of parenthood beyond the core childbearing ages by decomposing years lived between ages 40-74, in years of employment, joblessness, and retirement. Using multistate incidence-based life tables, we compare different cultural and institutional contexts: Finland, Italy, and the USA. Our results document large cross-national variation, with education playing a key role. In Finland, the number of years of employment increases with parity for women and men, and the gender gap is small; in the USA, the relationship between parity and years of employment is relatively flat, although a gender gap emerges among those with two or more children; in Italy, the number of years of employment decreases sharply for women as parity increases, while it increases for men. Notably, education has a similar positive impact on years of employment across all groups in Finland. In contrast, in the USA and Italy, the gender gap is only half as large among highly educated mothers as it is among low educated mothers. The employment trajectories of childless women and men differ greatly across countries.

Microfoundations of the weakening educational gradient in fertility.

The disappearance of the social gradient in fertility represents a paradigm shift that has called into question the validity of theories that predicted a decline in fertility with increased access to education and resources. Emerging theories have tried to explain this trend by highlighting a potential change in the fertility preferences of more educated couples. In this paper we add additional elements to this explanation. Using a computational modelling approach, we show that it is still possible to simulate the weakening social gradient in fertility, in the context of steady declines in family size preferences. Our results show that one of the key drivers of the change in the education-fertility relationship can be found in the transition to an increasingly regulated fertility regime. As the share of unplanned births decreases over time, the negative association between education and fertility weakens and the mechanisms that positively connect educational attainment with desired fertility become dominant.

Educational disparities in disability-free life expectancy across Europe: A focus on the East-West gaps from a gender perspective.

Education plays a crucial role in shaping the health outcomes of adults. This study examines the relationship between educational attainment and health across Europe. Using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), we estimate educational inequalities in disability-free life expectancy (DFLE) by gender in seven Western European (2004-2019) and three Central and Eastern European (CEE) (2010-2019) countries. We exploit a novel approach that combines the Sullivan method and multivariate life tables to calculate DFLE using SHARE data. We find that educational differences in DFLE favoring the better-educated exist in both CEE and Western European countries, but also that the differences across countries are more pronounced among the low-educated. While the absolute gaps in DFLE between low- and high-educated individuals in CEE and Western European countries are similar, the educational disparities in DFLE impose a more significant burden on the CEE populations due to their overall lower life expectancy. Educational inequalities are larger among women than among men in CEE countries, while the results for Western European countries are mixed. Our findings further highlight the important role of the institutional context in mitigating or exacerbating educational inequalities in health.

Does postponing retirement affect cognitive function? A counterfactual experiment to disentangle life course risk factors.

Evidence suggests that contemporaneous labor force participation affects cognitive function; however, it is unclear whether it is employment itself or endogenous factors related to individuals' likelihood of employment that protects against cognitive decline. We exploit innovations in counterfactual causal inference to disentangle the effect of postponing retirement on later-life cognitive function from the effects of other life-course factors. With the U.S. Health and Retirement Study (1996-2014, n = 20,469), we use the parametric g-formula to estimate the effect of postponing retirement to age 67. We also study whether the benefit of postponing retirement is affected by gender, education, and/or occupation, and whether retirement affects cognitive function through depressive symptoms or comorbidities. We find that postponing retirement is protective against cognitive decline, accounting for other life-course factors (population: 0.34, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.20,0.47; individual: 0.43, 95% CI: 0.26,0.60). The extent of the protective effect depends on subgroup, with the highest educated experiencing the greatest mitigation of cognitive decline (individual: 50%, 95% CI: 32%,71%). By using innovative models that better reflect the empirical reality of interconnected life-course processes, this work makes progress in understanding how retirement affects cognitive function.

Working and disability expectancies at older ages: The role of childhood circumstances and education.

The ability to work at older ages depends on health and education. Both accumulate starting very early in life. We assess how childhood disadvantages combine with education to affect working and health trajectories. Applying multistate period life tables to data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) for the period 2008-2014, we estimate how the residual life expectancy at age 50 is distributed in number of years of work and disability, by number of childhood disadvantages, gender, and race/ethnicity. Our findings indicate that number of childhood disadvantages is negatively associated with work and positively with disability, irrespective of gender and race/ethnicity. Childhood disadvantages intersect with low education resulting in shorter lives, and redistributing life years from work to disability. Among the highly educated, health and work differences between groups of childhood disadvantage are small. Combining multistate models and inverse probability weighting, we show that the return of high education is greater among the most disadvantaged.