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While many nations lay a claim to supporting 'family values', these values may be interpreted in a variety of ways. How do nations support families, particularly families with children? What strategies do different nations take, and how do these strategies lead to different outcomes? In this paper, we show how different combinations of policies that support family caregiving and those that de-familialize caregiving lead to significantly different outcomes. We show that nations with stronger levels of both kinds of policies have lower poverty levels than those with weaker levels of these policies, but that strong levels of policies that support family caregiving and weak levels of de-familializing policies have more varied results, with higher levels of poverty, particularly for families headed by single mothers. In addition, this research illustrates significant variation among 'continental Conservative' countries, and suggests the importance of a less static approach to welfare state regimes, which also fully recognizes the centrality of gender relations to labor market and welfare state policies.

Wealth ownership in the United States has long been concentrated in the hands of a small minority of the population, yet researchers have paid relatively little attention to the causes and consequences of this inequality. In this essay, we review the literature that does exist on wealth accumulation and distribution. We begin with an examination of the reasons that wealth inequality has received little empirical attention. We then discuss methods of creating empirical estimates of wealth accumulation and distribution, and we present some estimates of recent trends in wealth inequality. We explore a diverse collection of research that explains these trends, covering treatments of aggregate influences and individual and household factors. We conclude the chapter with a review of research on intergenerational processes and wealth mobility.

This study investigates the relationship between maternal employment and state-to-state differences in childcare cost and mean school day length. Pairing state-level measures with an individual-level sample of prime working-age mothers from the American Time Use Survey (2005–2014; n = 37,993), we assess the multilevel and time-varying effects of childcare costs and school day length on maternal full-time and part-time employment and childcare time. We find mothers' odds of full-time employment are lower and part-time employment higher in states with expensive childcare and shorter school days. Mothers spend more time caring for children in states where childcare is more expensive and as childcare costs increase. Our results suggest that expensive childcare and short school days are important barriers to maternal employment and, for childcare costs, result in greater investments in childcare time. Politicians engaged in national debates about federal childcare policies should look to existing state childcare structures for policy guidance.

AbstractA major shift in welfare state research occurred at the turn of the century as researchers moved from explaining the development of welfare states and variations in spending across welfare states to a focus on welfare state outcomes. One of the key outcomes examined in the literature is inequality. While much of the early literature examined overall spending, followed by analysis of specific taxes and transfers related to old age, unemployment, disability, health, and families, more recent research has included a broader range of welfare state policies including work‐family policies and flexicurity. This essay highlights some important developments in the research on welfare states and inequality.

In this paper, we examine the consequences of different welfare state strategies. We argue that four major strategies have appeared: 1) the primary caregiver/secondary earner strategy, focused on valuing the care in which women engage; 2) the primary earner/secondary caregiver strategy, focused on encouraging women's labor market participation; 3) the choice strategy, which provides support for women's employment, but also gives women the choice of emphasizing caretaking when children are very young; and 4) the earner-carer strategy, focused on helping men and women balance care and work through support for care both inside and outside of the home. We examine differences between women who are mothers of children and other women on three outcomes labor force participation rates, wage rates, and poverty rates, analyzing the effects of motherhood and marital status on labor force participation rates, annual earnings, and poverty rates. After analyzing these differences, our study suggests that the strategy taken by the earner-carer strategy is most effective at increasing equity for the widest array of women.

Research on the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) "pipeline" has charted the loss of potential STEM talent throughout students' secondary and postsecondary trajectories. One source of STEM talent loss that has been commonly suggested throughout the literature is the lack of family friendly flexibility in STEM careers. This explanation has been offered as a reason why women are underrepresented in the STEM fields. We test this thesis using original survey data collected from 3,229 college students at each of the 16 North Carolina public universities. Our results indicate that a concern for the potential inflexibility of one's future career is associated with a decreased likelihood of majoring in the "hard" STEM fields (physical sciences, engineering, and mathematics). However, we did not find gender differences in this effect, suggesting that men and women who are concerned with the family flexibility of their future career are equally likely to be deterred from STEM.

Focusing on an array of European and North American welfare states between 1985 and 2005, we consider how welfare state policies are related to households' relative incomes, taking into account cross-national and temporal differences in income distributions. At the same time, we consider how two of the central factors that may be driving income inequality at the individual or household level - parental educational level and family structure - may be related to a household's relative income. This research fills a gap in the literature because there are surprisingly few studies that examine inequality by both family structure and education, and even fewer that examine relative income cross-nationally and longitudinally. Theoretically, our contributions are to structural vulnerability theory. Structural vulnerability theory aims to consider how the individual, or the household, is structurally located within a context. Our analysis provides a better test of structural vulnerability theory than previous studies because structural vulnerability is operationalized in both the independent (through cross-level interactions) and dependent variables. By creating a dependent variable that standardizes household income relative to both median income and societal-level income inequality, we are able to get at the very center of structural vulnerability.

Remote, home-based work has long been devalued in the United States as it is associated with flexible work, disproportionately pursued by women, and a violation of ideal worker norms. The shutdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic created a scenario where a large proportion of professional/white-collar workers experienced remote work; and workers and managers witnessed the potential for continued productivity. This potentially shifted managers' perceptions of remote work, no longer signaling deviance from the ideal worker norm. Conversely, it may still trigger workplace penalties, despite wider adoption during the pandemic. Understanding these perceptions is important, especially for workers with young children who disproportionately access remote work. This study tests competing explanations for productive employees with young children through a survey experiment that assesses whether managers perceive that managers (i.e., their peers) (1) are equally supportive of remote and in-person employment; (2) think that rewards should be allocated differently in light of work location; and (3) impose different performance expectations in light of work location. We find that managers perceive that peers allocate higher rewards to in-person workers. This is partially explained by different perceptions of leadership, work commitment, and to a lesser extent competence. We do not find gender effects.

This paper analyzes the processes of distribution and redistribution in post-industrial democracies. We combine a pooled time series data base on welfare state effort and its determinants assembled by Huber, Ragin, and Stephens (1997) with data on income distribution assembled in the Luxembourg Income Survey (LIS) archive. In the case of the LIS data, we re-calculate the micro-data in order to remove the distorting influence of pensioners on pre-tax, pre transfer income distribution. We examine the determinants of three dependent variables: pre-tax, pre-transfer income inequality, post- tax, post transfer income inequality and the proportional reduction in inequality from pre to post tax and transfer inequality. We hypothesized that pre-tax, pre-transfer income inequality would be determined by labor market institutions (union density, bargaining centralization), labor market conditions (unemployment), and economic structures (post-industrialism, third world imports). We hypothesized that the reduction in inequality would be determined by political configurations: directly by left government and indirectly via their effect on welfare state generosity by left government and Christian democratic government. Post tax and transfer income inequality was hypothesized to be a product of the combination of labor market variables and political variables. The results broadly confirms our hypotheses and the overall fit is very good.

This article analyzes the processes of distribution and redistribution in postindustrial democracies. The authors combine a pooled time-series data base on welfare state effort and its determinants assembled by Huber, Ragin, and Stephens (1997) with data on income distribution assembled in the Luxembourg Income Survey (IJS) archive. In the case of the LIS data, the authors recalculate the microdata in order to remove the distorting influence of pensioners on pretax, pretransfer income distribution. They examine the determinants of two dependent variables: pretax, pretransfer income inequality and the proportional reduction in inequality from pre- to post—tax and transfer inequality. They test hypotheses derived from power resources theory against alternatives derived from the literature on the development of the welfare state and the determinants of income inequality, The results offer strong support for power resources theory, particularly in the case of reduction in inequality. Union density, unemployment, and percentage of female-headed households were the main determinants of pre—tax and transfer inequality (R2= .64), while leftist government, directly and indirectly through its influence on the size of the welfare state, was found to be by far the strongest determinant of distribution (R2= .81).