Labor Market Publications Research

Under Review

• Haley-Lock, A, (In press). Happy doing good? How workers’ career orientations and job satisfaction relate in grassroots human services. Journal of Community Practice.
  
  The abstract for this article is not available.
  
  
• Haley-Lock, A. & Kruzich, J. (In press). Serving workers in the human services: The roles of organizational ownership, chain affiliation and professional leadership in front-line job benefits. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly.
  
  A growing body of research has sought to understand forces shaping firms’ approaches to employee compensation and the impacts of job benefits on both organizational performance and worker well-being. One such line of work has documented advantages from employers adopting generous compensation practices, as evidenced by more successful worker recruitment and retention. Little of this work, however, has attended to benefits provided within nonprofit and public human service settings or to low-level workers. Drawing on a sample of Wisconsin nursing homes, this study addresses this gap by examining the roles of ownership, chain affiliation, and professional leadership in compensation provided to nursing assistants. Results indicate that public and nonprofit ownership and chain membership are positively related to benefit levels. Workers fare unexpectedly less well with professional directors in for-profit and public settings but better within professionally led nonprofits.
  
  
• Hirschman, C., (Forthcoming), The Structure of Teenage Employment: Social Background and the Jobs Held by High School Seniors, Research in Social Stratification and Mobility.
  
  The abstract for this article is not available.
  
  
• Klawitter, M.; Carpenter, C. (Forthcoming). Local Antidiscrimination Ordinances and the Earnings of Sexual Minorities: Evidence from the 2001 California Health Interview Survey. Public Policy and Sexual Orientation, Badgett, M. L.; Frank, J. (eds.).
  
  The abstract for this publication is not available.
  
  
• Lundberg, S.; Choi, H.-j.; Joesch, J., (Forthcoming), Sons, Daughters, Wives, and the Labour Market Outcomes of West German Men, Labour Economics.
  
  We find a strong association between family status and labor market outcomes for recent cohorts of West German men in the German Socio-Economic Panel. Living with a partner and living with a child both have substantial positive effects on earnings and work hours. These effects persist in individual fixed effects models that control for correlation in time-invariant unobservables that affect both family and work outcomes, though the inclusion of length of marriage reduces the effects of children. Child gender also matters — a first son increases fathers' work hours by 100 hours per year more than a first daughter, and positive effects of sons on work hours and earnings are particularly strong for men with higher levels of education. There is evidence of son “preference” in the probability that a German man is observed to be coresiding with a son — men are more likely to remain in the same household with a male child than a female child.
  
  
• Bushway, S.; Pettit, B.; Stoll, M. A.; Weiman, D. F.; Lyons, C., (2007), "Status and the Stigma of Incarceration: The Labor Market Effects of Incarceration by Race, Class, and Criminal Involvement" In Barriers to reentry? : the labor market for released prisoners in post-industrial America, Russell Sage Foundation, New York.
  
  The abstract for this publication is not available.
  
  
• Chatterji, P.; Takeuchi, D.; Alegria, M.; Lu, M., (2007), Psychiatric disorders and labor market outcomes: evidence from the National Latino and Asian American Study, Health economics., 16(10):1069.
  
  The abstract for this publication is not available.
  
  
• Haley-Lock, A. (2007). Up close and personal: Employee networks and job satisfaction in a human service context. Social Service Review. December: 683-707.
  
  This article investigates the association between workers’ networks of relationships used for advice on job tasks and their job satisfaction. It thus extends the study of personal employment networks from previous efforts that focus primarily on businesses to an examination of a type of human service organization. It situates this examination within a population of nonprofit domestic violence program employees. Prior research suggests that having emotionally close and physically proximate ties is positively related to general job satisfaction and that distant and dispersed ties are related to satisfaction with compensation and opportunity for promotion. The current results instead suggest that close ties are positively related to both types of satisfaction and that networking patterns and payoffs may be contextually shaped.
  
  
• Haley-Lock, A. and Ford Shah, M. (2007). Protecting vulnerable workers: How public policy and private employers shape the contemporary low-wage work experience. Families in Society, 88(3): 485-95.
  
  This paper presents a conceptual approach to understanding how government and private employers shape the employment experiences of contemporary low-wage workers. After reviewing recent changes in employment conditions that have disproportionately affected poor working families, we present two perspectives on the structural vulnerability for low-wage workers: policy and organizational stratification. The stratification approach suggests that public policy and private workplace practices interact with workers’ personal and family circumstances to shape the outcomes of low-wage employment. Applying these lenses to restaurant workers, we examine why and how some workers may be uniquely disadvantaged by emerging proposals to change minimum wage laws. Promising directions for intervention are also discussed.
  
  
• Haley-Lock, A. (2007). A workforce or workplace conflict?: Applying an organizational perspective to the study of human services employment. Administration in Social Work 31(3): 41-62.
  
  This paper applies an organizational perspective to the study of employment in human services workplaces, specifically domestic violence services agencies. The author used the theory of firmlevel labor markets to investigate how organizations occupying the same field of service may nonetheless differ in their approaches to granting instrumental benefits to their jobs. Data come from the population of 25 nonprofit domestic violence programs and their employees in aMidwestern metropolitan area. Examining a range of employment benefits, the author found that agencies as a whole and specific, comparable jobs differed in the access they provided to these "workplace opportunities," and concludes by discussing the theoretical and organizational implications of this variation for the workforce outcomes of recruitment, retention and diversity.
  
  
• Ellis, M.; Wright, R.; Parks, V., (2007), Geography and the Immigrant Division of Labor, Economic Geography. 83(3): 255-282.
  
  Immigrants concentrate in particular lines of work. Most investigations of such employment niching have accented either the demand for labor in a limited set of mostly low-wage industries or the efficiency of immigrant networks in supplying that labor; space has taken a backseat or has been ignored. In contrast, this article's account of immigrant employment niching modulates insights built on social network theories with understandings derived from relative location. We do so by altering the thinking about employment niches as being metropolitan wide to considering them as local phenomena. Specifically, the analysis examines the intraurban variation in niching by Mexican, Salvadoran, Chinese, and Vietnamese men and women in four industries in Los Angeles. Niching is uneven; in some parts of the metropolitan area, these groups niche at high rates in these industries, whereas in others, there is no unusual concentration. We show how a group's propensity to niche in an industry is generally higher when the industry is located close to the group's residential neighborhoods and demonstrate the ways in which the proximity of competing groups dampens this geographic advantage. The study speaks to debates on immigrant niching and connects with research on minority access to employment and accounts of the agglomeration of firms. More generally, it links the geographies of home and work in a new way, relating patterns of immigrant residential segregation to those of immigrant employment niches.
  
  
• Holt, S. D.; Romich, J. L., (2007), Marginal Tax Rates Facing Low- and Moderate-Income Workers Who Participate in Means-Tested Transfer Programs, National tax journal. 60(2): 253.
  
  The combination of a progressive tax system with credits for low-income workers and means-tested transfer programs can create high marginal tax rates (MTRs) on earned income. We document the extent and distribution of statutory and actual MTRs for Wisconsin households with earned income in 2000 using a unique data set of merged tax, transfer program, and wage data. Nearly a quarter of unmarried tax filers with two or more dependents face MTRs of 50 percent or greater. Households between 100 percent and 250 percent of the federal poverty threshold and those using multiple means-tested programs are more likely to face high rates.
  
  
• Haley-Lock, A., & Bruch, S. K. (2006). Workplace and workforce considerations in access to employment opportunity. Accepted for publication in D. Engstrom & L. Piedra (Eds.), Our Diverse Society: Race, Ethnicity, and Class, Washington, DC: NASW Press. Accepted for Publication (June 2006).
  
  The abstract for this article is not available.
  
  
• Romich, Jennifer L. (2006). Difficult calculations: Low-income workers and marginal tax rates. Social Service Review, 80(1): 27-66.
  
  Means-tested benefits and progressive tax measures are intended to support low-income working families, but they often create high effective marginal tax rates (MTRs). Low-wage workers who increase the number of hours at work or accept raises may find that increased earnings are partially, fully, or more than offset by decreased benefits or increased tax liability. Using longitudinal ethnographic data from 40 families, this study shows how families learn about, view, and respond to high implicit rates of taxation. Contrary to the rhetoric of welfare reform, high MTRs diminish families' opportunities for upward mobility and control over their lives through work.
  
  
• Lundberg, S. (2005). Men and Islands: Dealing with the Family in Empirical Labor Economics. Labour Economics, pp. 591-612. (Presented as the Adam Smith Lecture, European Association of Labour Economists Annual Meeting, 2004).
  
  Recent research in family economics emphasizes the interdependence of men's decisions about work and family, and should prompt a reconsideration of the standard practice in labor economics of ‘controlling’ for marital status and children in the analysis of labor market outcomes. Several factors contribute to a concern about work-family simultaneity. First, married men behave very differently from single men, and fathers from non-fathers. Second, transitions into and out of marriage, cohabitation, and custodial parenthood respond to current economic conditions, and not just to fixed individual characteristics. Finally, demographic changes in developed countries have left marriage and parenthood optional, economically ambiguous, and relatively unstable. Labor economists need to recognize that a man's current partnership and parenting status are current choices that can change, that are expected to change, and that respond to the social, economic, and institutional forces that also condition labor market behavior.
  
  
• Pettit, Becky and Jennifer Hook.(2005). The Structure of Women’s Employment in Comparative Perspective. Social Forces, 84:779-801.
  
  In this paper we analyze social survey data from 19 countries using multi- level modeling methods in an effort to synthesize structural and institutional accounts for variation in women's employment. Observed demographic characteristics show much consistency in their relationship to women's employment across countries, yet there is significant variation in the effect of demographic characteristics on women's employment across countries. Disentangling specific policy conditions from overall policy generosity leads us to discover important non-linearities in the effects of parental leave on the employment of women with young children, and that federally supported childcare is positively related to the probability of employment of married women and women with young children.
  
  
• Reskin, B., (2005), Unconsciousness Raising: Women's Underrepresentation in Top-Level Jobs, Regional Review, 14: 3, 32-37.
  
  The abstract for this article is not available.
  
  
• Reskin, B.; Bielby, D., (2005), A Sociological Perspective on Gender and Career Outcomes, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 19: Winter, 71-86.
  
  Both economists and sociologists have documented the association between gender and career outcomes. Men are more likely than women to participate in the labor force, and men average more hours of paid labor per week and more weeks per year. Women and men tend to hold different occupations and to work in different industries, firms and jobs. Furthermore, men outearn women, hold more complex jobs and are more likely to supervise workers of the other sex and to dominate the top positions in their organization. The challenge for both disciplines lies not in showing that gender is linked to employment outcomes, but in explaining the associations. Sex segregation across jobs reflects the long-standing association between workers' sex and their careers, and it is the primary mechanism through which workers' sex is associated with other career outcomes, such as earnings, job authority and promotion chances.
  
  
• Western, Bruce and Becky Pettit. (2005). Black-White Wage Inequality, Employment Rates, and Incarceration. American Journal of Sociology, 111:553-578. Winner 2006 James F. Short Jr. Paper Award.
  
  The observed gap in average wages between black men and white men inadequately reflects the relative economic standing of blacks, who suffer from a high rate of joblessness. The authors estimate the black-white gap in hourly wages from 1980 to 1999 adjusting for the sample selection effect of labor inactivity. Among working-age men in 1999, accounting for labor inactivity--including prison and jail incarceration--leads to an increase of 7%-20% in the black-white wage gap. Adjusting for sample selectivity among men ages 22-30 in 1999 increases the wage gap by as much as 58%. Increasing selection bias, which can be attributed to incarceration and conventional joblessness, explains about two-thirds of the rise in black relative wages among young men between 1985 and 1998. Apparent improvement in the economic position of young black men is thus largely an artifact of rising joblessness fueled by the growth in incarceration during the 1990s.
  
  
• Gornick, J.C., and Meyers, M.K. (2004). Supporting a Dual-Earner / Dual- Carer Society: Lessons From Abroad. In J. Heymann and C. Beem (eds.) Societal Crossroads: Striving for Democracy and Equality in the Era of Working Families. New York: The New Press.
  
  The link to the abstract for this article is unavailable.
  
  
• Lambert, S. J., & Haley-Lock, A. (2004). The organizational stratification of opportunities for work-life balance. Community, Work and Family, 7(2), 179-195.
  
  As organizational scholars, we offer an 'organizational stratification' approach useful for revealing inequalities in the distribution of work-life 'opportunities' within and across jobs and workplaces. In doing so, we discuss the implications of historically narrow conceptualizations of workplace opportunity -- typically focused on promotion only -- and suggest a more expansive approach to theorizing, and in turn operationalizing, workplace opportunities essential to worker and family well-being. We illustrate how researchers might employ an organizational stratification approach by describing an ongoing research project in which we differentiate opportunities 'on paper' from opportunities 'in practice' and examine variations in how US employers distribute work-life opportunities among lower-skilled jobs. We demonstrate how an organizational stratification perspective can be useful for developing knowledge on the nature of inequality in the distribution of opportunities for work-life balance, and thus, for suggesting new avenues that enhance social justice in the workplace.
  
  
• Bainbridge, J., Meyers, M.K. & Waldfogel, J. (2003). Child Care Policy Reform and the Employment of Single Mothers. Social Science Quarterly, 84(4), 771-791.
  
  The abstract for this article is unavailable.
  
  
• Ellis, Mark, Richard Wright, Jamie Goodwin-White. (2003). "Shifts in the Ethnic Division of Labor under Conditions of Growth and Stagnation: Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s". (Forthcoming in the Immigrant Metropolis, Bean, Brown and Rumbaut eds).
  
  Throughout the 1970s and 1980s the Los Angeles CMSA enjoyed a remarkable period of economic growth fueled by a varied array of manufacturing and service industries. In the 1970s the employment base increased by 30%; job growth accelerated in the 1980s to 38%. This expansion stands in marked contrast to New York, which absorbed immigrants despite anemic job growth at best. New York’s ethnic division of labor was transformed by immigrants and non-white natives replacing native-born whites who either retired or left the city’s labor force for greener pastures. LA, on the other hand, saw its native born white labor force increase through the 1970s and 1980s even as immigration mushroomed. The 1990s saw a dramatic reversal of fortunes for the LA CMSA. The number of jobs held steady through the decade as the region absorbed crushing blows from post cold war defense industry restructuring and its knock on effects. LA’s aerospace and electronics industries crumbled leading to estimates that over half the manufacturing jobs lost in the early 90s recession was from LA and Orange Counties alone (LA Times). This collapse, coupled with the effects of the mass civil disturbances that followed the Rodney King trial in 1992 and the Northridge earthquake in early 1994, meant that the region’s economy remained tepid through the mid 1990s. Thus California’s prosperity in the 1990s came largely from the booming economy of the Bay Area at least until the end of the decade. In effect, the job market in LA came to resemble that of New York in terms of the way it absorbed newcomers: the process has become one of immigrant and native-born minority replacement for native-born whites than differential rates of job expansion enjoyed by all groups. Figure one charts the overall change in jobs between 1980 and 2000 alongside job increases and decreases for specific groups. Figure two charts employment change by sector. The only bright spots in the economy in the 1990s were in educational and business services and, to a lesser extent in entertainment services. All other sectors added few jobs or declined. With this economic transformation as the backdrop, we explore shifts in employment by major industrial sector for a variety of native-born and immigrant groups. We are especially interested in where native-born whites exited the labor force and which groups replaced them. Did these replacement job gains result in decent jobs for immigrants or native-born minorities? Or is the replacement labor process reinforcing the position of some of these groups on the bottom rungs of LA’s economy?
  
  
• Gornick, J.C. & Meyers, M.K. (2003). Families That Work: Policies for Reconciling Parenthood and Employment. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
  
  Balancing work and family life is a problem affecting a large share of Americans today. Families That Work is a significant contribution to a growing literature on this subject. Janet Gornick and Marcia Meyers, both professors of public policy, say the U.S. continues to lag behind other industrialized western nations that have institutionalized social and labor policies that promote an equal division of labor between parents juggling work and family responsibilities. As the structure of the American family continues to change, the authors say, private solutions to solving conflicts between work and family life are no longer tenable. Their book illustrates how the U.S. falls short compared to Canada and many European countries on critical quality-of-life indicators including wage losses associated with working part-time, gender inequality in the labor market and at home, family poverty, and child well-being. In their comparative analysis, they make a strong case for an expanded role by the U.S. government to help decrease the time squeeze on employed parents, enhance the well-being of children, and promote increased gender equity in the workforce and at home.
  
  
• Gornick, J.C., and Meyers, M.K. (2003). Welfare Regimes in Relation to Paid Work and Care. In J.Z. Giele and E. Holst (eds.) Changing Life Patterns in Western Industrial Societies. Netherlands: Elsevier Science
  
  The link to the abstract for this article is unavailable.
  
  
• Lundberg, S., Rose E. (2002). The Effect of Sons and Daughters on Men’s Labor Supply and Wages. Review of Economics and Statistics, May, 251-268.
  
  In this paper, we estimate the effects of children and the differential effects of sons and daughters on men's labor supply and hourly wage rates. The responses to fatherhood of two cohorts of men from the PSID sample are examined separately, and we use fixed-effects estimation to control for unobserved heterogeneity. We find that fatherhood significantly increases the hourly wage rates and annual hours of work for men from both cohorts. Most notably, men's labor supply and wage rates increase more in response to the births of sons than to the births of daughters.
  
  
• Meyers, M.K. & Lee, J.W. (2002). Working but Poor: How Are Families Faring? Children and Youth Services Review, 25(3), 177-201.
  
  The abstract for this article is unavailable.
  
  
• Meyers, M.K., Gornick, J. & Peck, L. (2002). More, Less, or More of the Same? Publius, 32(4), 91-108.
  
  Major reforms to cash assistance and other welfare programs in the 1990s raise questions about whether states gained new flexibility in setting social policies, and, if so, how they exercised this flexibility. We extend prior research on state social policy by examining trends during the middle to late I 990s in five areas of cash or near-cash policy affecting the economic security of low-income families. We find evidence of substantial change in the generosity and the availability of these benefits between 1994 and 1999, along with evidence of greater divergence or cross-state variation in policy choices. By considering several forms of assistance simultaneously, we also find evidence that states constricted traditional welfare-based assistance while expanding some forms of non-welfare support for the working poor.
  
  
• Meyers, M.K., Heintze, T. & Wolf, D. (2002). Child Care Subsidies and the Employment of Welfare Recipients. Demography, 39(1), 165-179.
  
  Changing patterns of maternal employment, coupled with stronger work requirements for welfare recipients, are increasing the demand for child care. For many families, the cost of child care creates a financial burden; for mothers with low incomes and those who are former welfare recipients, these costs may be an insurmountable barrier to employment or economic self-sufficiency. Despite increased public spending in this area, the receipt of any child care subsidy appears to be a relatively rare and uncertain event. In this study, we use data from a sample of low-income single mothers (current and recent welfare recipients in California) to estimate the probability of their receiving child care subsidies and the effect of this probability on labor market activity.
  
  
• Padavic, Irene and Barbara F. Reskin. (2002). Women and Men at Work (2nd ed.) Pine Forge Press.
  
  The Second Edition of this best selling book provides a comprehensive examination of the role that gender plays in work environments. This book differs from others by comparing women’s and men’s work status, addressing contemporary issues within a historical perspective, incorporating comparative material from other countries, recognizing differences in the experiences of women and men from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. Relying on both qualitative and quantitative data, the authors seek to link social scientific ideas about workers’ lives, sex inequality, and gender to the real-world workplace. This new edition contains updated statistics, timely cartoons, and presents new scholarship in the field. It also provides a renewed focus on reasons for variability in inequality across workplaces. In sum, the second edition of Women and Men at Work presents a contemporary perspective to the field, with relevant comparative and historical insights that will draw readers in and connect them to the wider concern of making sense of our dramatically changing world.
  
  
• Reskin, Barbara. (2002). "Rethinking Employment Discrimination." Pp. 218-44 in Mauro F. Guillen, Randall Collins, Paula England, and Marshall Meyer (eds.). The New Economic Sociology: Developments in an Emerging Field. N.Y.: Russell Sage.
  
  The abstract for this article is not available.
  
  
• Conway, Dennis, Adrian Bailey, and Mark Ellis. (2001). "Transnationalism, Employment, and the Poverty of Puerto Rican Women in New York City" In Transnational Communities and the Political Economy of New York City in the 1990s. Cordero-Guzman, Grosfoguel and Smith (eds), Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
  
  Puerto Rican women living in New York City represent a segment of a transnational community with some of the highest rates of poverty on the US mainland. This community is characterized by high rates of repetitive (circulation) migration, and we discuss evidence that links circulation migration to the reduced labor force participation of Puerto Rican women. We utilize a pooled data set of micro-level, longitudinal event-histories, drawn from two complementary sets: the 1982 Puerto Rico Fertility and Family Planning Assessment and the 1985 Survey of Fertility, Employment and Migration Among Puerto Rican Women. We find that nativity plays a strong role in differentiating a group of women with work experience in New York from a group of women with no work experience in New York. The relationship between circulation migration and labor force participation is more nuanced. We interpret these findings in the light of our previous research on the gendering of circulation migration and the emerging discussion of racialized experiences of migrants in the U.S. We close by arguing for a re-conceptualization of poverty conditions in transnational communities that offers more insight into the material conditions, gender relations, racialized experiences, and household survival strategies.
  
  
• Ellis, Mark and John Odland. (2001). Intermetropolitan Variation in the Labor Force Participation of White and Black Men in the United States. Urban Studies, 38, 2327-2348.
  
  We decompose the variance in black and white male labour force participation rates across US metropolitan areas in 1990 into three effects: that due to variation in labour force participation within labour force categories across metropolitan areas (local labour market effects); that due to variation in the distribution of those categories across metropolitan areas (labour force structure effects); and that due to the covariation between these two effects. Variation in labour force participation rates within labour force categories (local labour market effects) accounts for 56 per cent of the variance in labour force participation rates across metropolitan areas for white men but over 75 per cent for black men. Variation in the frequency of membership in each labour force category is a relatively unimportant factor for both groups. The covariance between labour force effects and local effects is negligible for black men but accounts for 25 per cent of the intermetropolitan variance in white male participation rates. This covariance is a measure of how well adjusted the labour force characteristics of metropolitan areas are to local economic conditions; our results indicate that this adjustment is greater for white men than black men. We also use this decomposition to identify the causes of variation in the difference between black and white labour force participation rates. Black-white differences in response to local labour market effects conditions generate most of this variance. These different local labour market effects are greatest among young single men with less than a high school education.
  
  
• Ellis, Mark. (2001). "Trends in Immigrant and Native-born Wages: A Tale of Five Cities?" In Strangers at the Gates. R Waldinger (ed.) University of California Press
  
  The abstract for this article is not available.
  
  
• Meyers, M.K. & Gornick, J.C. (2001). Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC): Cross-National Variation in Service Organization and Financing. In S. Kamerman (ed.) Early Childhood Education and Care: International Perspectives. New York: Columbia Institute for Child and Family Policy, New York NY.
  
  The abstract for this article is unavailable.
  
  
• Meyers, M.K., & Gornick, J.C. (2001). Gendering Welfare State Variation: Income Transfers, Employment Supports, and Family Poverty. In N. Hirschmann and U. Liebert (eds.) Women and Welfare: Theory and Practice in the United States and Europe. New Jersey: Rutgers University
  
  The abstract for this article is unavailable.
  
  
• Meyers, M.K., Han, W.J., Waldfogel, J., & Garfinkel, I. (2001). Child Care in the Wake of Welfare Reform: The Impact of Government Subsidies on the Economic Well-Being of Single Mother Families. Social Services Review, 75(1), 29-59.
  
  Using microsimulation techniques to estimate the impact of welfare reform in New York, we find that 5 years after federal and state reforms child-care use and costs will rise substantially and families will bear most of these costs. When family incomes are adjusted for child-care costs, most single- mother families will continue to be poor even with greater earnings, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and food stamps. The distribution of child-care costs between government and families, and the implications for poverty, will depend on the extent to which government subsidizes the child-care of single mothers.
  
  
• Reskin, Barbara. (2001). "Sex Segregation at Work." Pp. 13962-13965 in N. J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes (editors), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Oxford: Pergamon.
  
  The abstract for this article is not available.
  
  
• Reskin, Barbara. "Sex Stereotyping and Sex Bias in Employment." Pp. 1891-92 in Cheris Kramarae and Dale Spender (eds.), Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women’s Studies. N.Y.: Routledge, vol. 4.
  
  The abstract for this article is not available.
  
  
• Cassirer, Naomi and Barbara Reskin. (2000). High Hopes: Organizational Location, Employment Experiences, and Women's and Men's Promotion Aspirations. Work and Occupations, 27:438-63.
  
  Kanter argued that men's and women's positions in workplace opportunity structures, not their sex, shape their career attitudes. Women attached less importance to promotion than men, according to 1991 General Social Survey data. The authors examine the extent to which this difference stems from the sexes' segregation into jobs with unequal opportunities, as Kanter argued. The findings are largely consistent with Kanter's thesis: Men attached greater importance to promotion than women because they were more likely to be located in organizational positions that encourage workers to hope for a promotion. Net of the effects of workers' organizational locations and prior promotion by their employer, sex was not associated with promotion attitudes.
  
  
• Kalleberg, Arne, Barbara Reskin, and Ken Hudson. (2000). Bad Jobs in America: Standard and Nonstandard Employment Relations and Job Quality in the United States. American Sociological Review, 65:256-78. 2000.
  
  The prevalence of nonstandard jobs is a matter of concern if, as many assume, such jobs are bad. We examine the relationship between nonstandard employment (on-call work and day labor, temporary-help agency employment, employment with contract companies, independent contracting, other self-employment, and part-time employment in "conventional" jobs) and exposure to "bad" job characteristics, using data from the 1995 Current Population Survey. Of workers age 18 and over, 31 percent are in some type of nonstandard employment. To assess the link between type of employment and bad jobs, we conceptualize "bad jobs" as those with low pay and without access to health insurance and pension benefits. About one in seven jobs in the United States is bad on these three dimensions. Nonstandard employment strongly increases workers' exposure to bad job characteristics, net of controls for workers' personal characteristics, family status, occupation, and industry.
  
  
• Lundberg, S. with Elaina Rose (2000). Parenthood and the Earnings of Married Men and Women. Labour Economics, November, 689-710.
  
  We use longitudinal data to examine the relationship between parenthood, wages, and hours worked for married men and women. We find evidence of negative selection into parenthood, substantial child-related reallocations of time within the household, and heterogeneity in the effects of children on household behavior. In households in which the wife experiences an interruption in employment, mothers' wages and hours worked fall, while fathers' hours and wages increase. In households in which the mother remains continuously attached to the labor force, however, there is no evidence of a wage decline for mothers, and the hours worked by fathers decrease substantially.
  
  
• Meyers, M.K., Gornick, J. & Ross, K. (2000). Public Child Care, Parental Leave and Employment. In D. Sainsbury (ed.) Gender Policy Regimes and Welfare States. Oxford University Press.
  
  The abstract for this article is unavailable.
  
  
• Reskin, Barbara and Debra McBrier. (2000). Why Not Ascription? Organizations’ Employment of Male and Female Managers. American Sociological Review, 65:210-33.
  
  We examine the effects of organizations' employment practices on sex- based ascription in managerial jobs. Given men's initial preponderance in management, we argue that inertia, sex labels, and power dynamics predispose organizations to use sex-based ascription when staffing managerial jobs, but that personnel practices can invite or curtail ascription. Our results-based on data from a national probability sample of 516 work organizations-show that specific personnel practices affect the sexual division of managerial labor. Net of controls for the composition of the labor supply, open recruitment methods are associated with women holding a greater share of management jobs, while recruitment through informal networks increases men's share. Formalizing personnel practices reduces men's share of management jobs, especially in large establishments, presumably because formalization checks ascription in job assignments, evaluation, and factors that affect attrition. Thus, through their personnel practices, establishments license or limit ascription.
  
  
• Reskin, Barbara. (2000). "Work and Occupations." Pp. 3261-69 in Edgar F. Borgatta and Rhonda J. V. Montgomery (eds.), International Encyclopedia of Sociology, 2nd ed. N.Y.: MacMillan.
  
  The abstract for this article is not available.
  
  
• Reskin, Barbara. (2000). Getting It Right: Sex and Race Inequality in Work Organizations. Annual Review of Sociology, 26:707-09.
  
  The abstract for this article is not available.
  
  
• Western, Bruce and Becky Pettit. (2000). Incarceration and Racial Inequality in Men’s Employment. Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 54:3-16.
  
  To estimate employment-population ratios for black and white men with an adjustment for incarceration-a factor overlooked by most research on employment inequality-the authors combine data from surveys of prisons and jails with data from the Current Population Survey. This adjustment significantly reduces estimated employment rates for African Americans, young workers, and young high school dropouts. The authors find that employment among young black male high school dropouts steadily declined between 1982 and 1996 despite periods of very low unemployment in the labor market as a whole. Standard labor force data, which include no incarceration data, understate black-white inequality in employment among young dropouts by about 45%.
  
  
• Wright, Richard and Mark Ellis. (2000). The Ethnic and Gender Division of Labor Compared Among Immigrants to Los Angeles. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 24: 583-601.
  
  This study compares the occupational profiles of six immigrant groups in the Los Angeles economy to expose details of the relationship between gender, nativity, time of arrival and labor market segmentation. We investigate the occupational division of labor among the foreign-born from Mexico, El Salvador, the Philippines, Guatemala, Korea and China and find that gender plays a dominant role relative to ethnicity in the process of labor market segmentation. We also discover that newly arrived immigrant men are more likely to enter male-dominated occupations than newly arrived women are likely to concentrate in female-dominated occupations. This tendency, however, varies in strength by nativity. Nativity and time of arrival also affect the anatomy of occupational specialization, but, again, this effect is not consistent across groups. Our observation of variability in the relative strength of gender and ethnicity in the determination of occupational profiles across a broad sample of immigrant groups directs future researchers to consider how ethnic resources are gendered in different ways by nativity.
  
  
• Ellis, Mark and Richard Wright. (1999). The Industrial Division of Labor among Immigrants and Internal Migrants to the Los Angeles Economy. International Migration Review, 33: 26-54
  
  Between 1985-90, metropolitan Los Angeles received about 400,000 working immigrants and about 575,000 working native in-migrants. We subdivide these native-and foreign-born migrants by national origin and ethnicity to examine the process that channel recent arrivals into different industrial sectors. Our analysis extends previous research on migrant employment and the ethnic division of labor in two ways. We compare the employment of recent arrivals to residents for several groups across a large, diverse regional economy. We also consider the role educational qualifications play in the allocation of different migrant groups to jobs at this aggregate analytical scale. The results show that both native- and foreign- born groups channel into particular industrial sectors. The strength of group channeling, however, varies by national origin and ethic group. Native-born in-migration are more likely to channel into the industries where their co- ethnic residents work than immigrant newcomers. We also find some groups more likely to take jobs grant newcomers. We also find some groups more likely to take jobs based on their educational qualifications (whites, blacks, Filipinos and Chinese), whereas ethnic group effects dominate the choice of industry of others (Koreans). The analysis investigates the issue of interethnic labor market competition by comparing the employment profiles of newcomers with those of resident ethnic groups. It shows that immigrants experience more interethnic labor market competition from new-comers than do native whites and blacks.
  
  
• Lundberg, S. with Daniel Klepinger and Robert Plotnick. (1999). How Does Adolescent Fertility Affect the Human Capital and Wages of Young Women? Journal of Human Resources, Summer, 421-448.
  
  We estimate the relationship between teenage childbearing, human capital investment, and wages in early adulthood, using a sample of women from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and a large set of potential instruments for fertility-principally state and county-level indicators of the costs of fertility and fertility control. Adolescent fertility substantially reduces years of formal education and teenage work experience and, for white women only, early adult work experience. Through reductions in human capital, teenage childbearing has a significant effect on market wages at age 25. Our results suggest that public policies which reduce teenage childbearing are likely to have positive effects on the economic well-being of young mothers.
  
  
• Meyers, M.K. & Heintze, T. (1999). The Performance of the Child-Care Subsidy System. Social Service Review, 73(1), 37-64.
  
  Government funding has increased substantially in recent years for child- care subsidies targeted on the poor. Given the importance of child care for the achievement of public policy goals, including the promotion of families' economic self-sufficiency outside the welfare system, the performance of the child-care subsidy system deserves scrutiny. We use data from household-level surveys to compare the target efficiency, coverage adequacy, and equity of the child-care subsidy system for low-income and welfare-recipient families in California. The results suggest serious limitations in the system as of the mid-1990s. Low-income families in which mothers were employed or in education and training programs were very likely to be regularly paying for child care, and very few were receiving public subsidies targeted explicitly to the poor. These findings have important policy implications for new state child-care and welfare programs.
  
  
• Reskin, Barbara and Irene Padavic. (1999). "Sex, Race, and Ethnic Inequality in United States Workplaces." Pp. 343-74 in Janet S. Chafetz (ed.), Handbook of Gender Research. N.Y.: Plenum.
  
  The abstract for this article is not available.
  
  
• Reskin, Barbara, Debra McBrier, and Julie Kmec (1999). The Determinants and Consequences of the Sex and Race Composition of Work Organizations. Annual Review of Sociology, 25:335-61. 1999.
  
  This chapter reviews research on the determinants and consequences of race and sex composition of organizations. Determinants include the composition of the qualified labor supply; employers' preferences, including the qualifications they require; the response of majority groups; and an establishment's attractiveness, size, and recruiting methods. The race and sex composition of an establishment affects workers' cross-group contact; stress, satisfaction, and turnover; cohesion; stereotyping; and evaluation. Composition also affects organizations themselves, including their performance, hiring and promotion practices, levels of job segregation, and wages and benefits. Theory-driven research is needed (a) on the causal mechanisms that underlie the relationships between organizational composition and its determinants and consequences and (b) on the form of the relationships between organizational composition and workers outcomes (e.g., cross-group contact, cohesion, turnover, etc). Research is needed on race and ethnic composition, with a special focus on the joint effects of race and sex.
  
  
• Reskin, Barbara F. (1999). "Racial and Ethnic Occupational Segregation among Women." Pp. 183-204 in Latinas and African American Women in the Labor Market, edited by I. Browne. N.Y.: Russell Sage.
  
  The abstract for this article is not available.
  
  
• Reskin, Barbara F. and Camille Z. Charles. (1999). "Now You See ‘Em, Now You Don’t: Theoretical Approaches to Race and Gender in Labor Markets." Pp. 380-407 in Latinas and African American Women in the Labor Market, edited by Irene Browne. N.Y.: Russell Sage.
  
  The abstract for this article is not available.
  
  
• Gornick, J.C., Meyers, M.K., & Ross, K.E. (1997). Supporting the Employment of Mothers: Policy Variation Across Fourteen Welfare States. Journal of European Social Policy, 7(1), 45-70.
  
  Despite their broadly similar political and economic systems, the rates and patterns ofmothers' employment vary considerably across industrialized countries. This variation raises questions about the role played by government policies in enabling mothers to choose employment and, in turn, in shaping both gender equality and family economic well-being. This paper compares fourteen OECD countries, as of the middle-to-late 1980s, with respect to their provision of policies that support mothers' employment: parental leave, child care, and the scheduling of public education. Newly gathered data on eighteen policy indicators are presented; these indicators were chosen to capture support for maternal employment, regardless of national intent. The indicators are then standardized, weighted, and summed into indices. By differentiating policies that affect maternal employment from family policies more generally, while simultaneously aggregating individual policies and policy features into policy "packages", these indices reveal dramatic cross-national differences in policy provisions. The empirical results reveal loose clusters of countries that correspond only partially to prevailing welfare state typologies. For mothers with preschool-aged children, only five of the fourteen countries provided reasonably complete and continuous benefits that supported their options for combining paid work with family responsibilities. In the remaining countries, government provisions were much more limited or discontinuous. The pattern of cross-national policy variation changed notably when policies affecting mothers with older children were examined. The links between these findings and three sets of outcomes are considered. The indices provide an improved measure of public support for maternal employment and are expected to help explain cross-national differences in the level and continuity of women's labor market attachment. Prior findings on women's labor supply provide initial support for this conclusion. These indices are also useful for contrasting family benefits that are provided through direct cash transfers with those that take the form of support for mothers' employment. Cross-national variation in combinations of transfers with employment supports is found to correspond to differences in child poverty rates. Finally, these policy findings contribute to the body of scholarship that seeks to integrate gender issues more explicitly into research on welfare state regimes. This study suggests that the country clusters identified in the dominant regime model fail to cohere with respect to the subset of family policies that specifically help women to combine paid work with parenting.
  
  
• Meyers, M.K. (1993). Child Care in JOBS Employment and Training Programs: What Difference Does Quality Make? Journal of Marriage and the Family, 55(August), 767-783.
  
  Under the provisions of the Family Support Act of 1988, AFDC recipients in JOBS welfare-to-work programs are entitled to child care assistance during their education and job search activities. Data from a 1-year panel study of a JOBS program indicate that participants increased their use of substitute care and their use of licensed day care homes and centers, after beginning job readiness activities. The care they obtained was highly variable in terms of convenience and program quality, however, and compromises in the adequacy of care or in the congruence of care with parents' preferences increased participants' odds of dropping out of the program without completing education and job search activities.