Under Pressure? Assessing the Roles of Cognitive Skills and Other Personal Resources for Work-Family and Work-Parenting Gains and Strains
Event Date: 27 September 2017
Time: 4.15pm
Speaker: Niels-Hugo Blunch, Washington and Lee University
Location: Strathclyde Business School, Cathedral WIng CW507b
Abstract:
Many working parents struggle to balance the demands of their jobs and family roles. Although we might expect that additional resources would ease work-family constraints, theory and evidence regarding resources have been equivocal. This study uses recent data on working mothers and fathers—as well as their cohabiting partners/spouses—from the Household, Income, and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey to investigate how personal resources in the form of skills, cognitive capabilities, and personality traits affect work-life balance. It considers this along with standard measures of economic, social, and personal resources, and conducts multivariate analyses of work-life balance for employed mothers and fathers. Several empirical specifications are estimated, ranging from benchmark OLS regressions to more advanced SEMs, where the latter estimates the work-life balance models for both spouses jointly and also takes into account other potential linkages between spouses. OLS estimates indicate that computer skills improve work-life balance for mothers, while math skills improve work-life balance for fathers. Alternatively estimating an SEM instead suggests that while the direct effects between spousal gains and strains are modest, jointly explicitly incorporating spousal behavior through this estimator has substantial indirect effects, by changing the importance of several key variables in both substantive and statistical terms.
Speaker:
Niels-Hugo (Hugo) Blunch, a native Dane, is an Associate Professor at the Department of Economics, Washington and Lee University where he teaches Statistics, Econometrics, Health: A Social Science Exploration, African Economic Development (Ghana Spring Term Abroad), Health Economics in Developing Countries, and Health and Education in Economic Development (Senior Research Seminar/Pre-Capstone). Prior to joining W&L, he worked at the World Bank Headquarters in Washington, D.C. He is also a Research Fellow at IZA (Institute for the Study of Labor, Bonn) and GLO (the Global Labor Organization). He received his Ph.D. in economics from The George Washington University in 2006. His research interests are in the areas of labor, health, education, development, transition economics and economic demography. His publications include articles in journals such as Economic Development and Cultural Change, Education Economics, World Bank Economic Review, and World Development, as well as several chapters in edited volumes.
Published: 19 September 2017
