Work-family balance.

• Author: Ruhm, Christopher J.
• Position: Research Summaries

Difficulties in balancing the competing needs of work and home life are likely to be most acute for families with young children. Two trends -- dramatic increases in employment rates of women, including mothers of young children, and the rise in lone-parent families -- make this particularly relevant. Much of my research (often with coauthors) focuses on a broad set of issues surrounding these topics, particularly parental leave policies, employment by parents of young children, and early childcare and education. Some of the studies take a cross-national perspective, motivated by the sharp differences between many U.S. policies and those in other industrialized countries. For instance, parental leave entitlements are particularly limited in the United States, where early childcare generally is more a private responsibility. (1)

Parental Time with Children

Liana Fox, Wen-Jui Han, Jane Waldfogel, and I use March Current Population Survey (CPS) data for 1967-2009 to examine how these trends in family structure and parental employment translate into changes in two important inputs into children's wellbeing: time and money. (2) We supplement our primary analysis with investigations of time use and work scheduling arrangements. The analysis is child-based, in that it identifies secular changes for the typical child (rather than family). Our results verify that children have become much less likely to have a parent at home full or part-time: in the late 1960s approximately two-thirds of children were in homes with a nonworking parent compared to only around one-third at the beginning of the twenty-first century. These trends primarily reflect increases in the probabilities that parents hold jobs, rather than longer work hours for those who are employed or changes in family structure. For children in two-parent families, increases in market work have raised household incomes; for those with a single parent, the changes were largely required to offset income declines that otherwise would have occurred. Working parents spend less time in primary child-care than their nonworking counterparts. However, holding employment status constant, childcare hours have trended upwards, so the implications of these changes for child wellbeing are unclear.

Parental Leave Policies in Europe

In a series of papers, I examine the consequences of policies providing parents with rights to time off work following the birth of an infant. Because these entitlements are more extensive and have a longer history in Europe than the United States, my initial research involves a cross-national investigation of policies in Western European nations. Jackueline Teague and I construct a longitudinal data set detailing durations of job-protected leave in 17 European nations from 1960-1989, provide evidence of the trend towards increased durations of leave rights, and explore the relationship between these policies and macroeconomic outcomes. (3) Next, I conduct a differences-in-differences (DD) analysis of labor market outcomes for nine European countries covering the period 1969-93. (4) The identification strategy compares changes for females...