Gonalons-Pons, Pilar

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  • Publication
  • Publication
    Exit, Voice, and Loyalty in the Family
    (2020-10-02) Gonalons-Pons, Pilar; Calnitsky, David
    This paper investigates how a basic income could transform families and gender power relations within them. We draw on Hirschman’s exit, voice, and loyalty framework to argue that a basic income can offer a structural foundation for a radical shift towards more equitable family relations. This is because a basic income can support couples through economic uncertainty and reduce women’s structural vulnerability to economic dependency within marriages that strips them of exit and voice. We build our case on novel data from an understudied social experiment from the late 1970s called the Manitoba Basic Income Experiment, or Mincome. Using difference-in-difference regression with individual fixed-effects, we analyze three types of family outcomes: separation, bargaining power, and marital conflict. We find that during Mincome unhappy couples became more likely to consider separation, but that separation overall did not increase. We also find that Mincome reduced marital conflict associated with financial stressors and that some measures of wives’ bargaining power increased. Taken together, our results speak in favor of the view that a basic income has the potential to foster more equitable family lives.
  • Publication
    Changes in Couples’ Earnings Following Parenthood and Trends in Family Earnings Inequality
    (2020-07-26) Gonalons-Pons, Pilar; Schwartz, Christine R.; Musick, Kelly
    The growing economic similarity of spouses has contributed to rising income inequality across households. Explanations have typically centered on assortative mating, but recent work has argued that changes in women’s employment and spouses’ division of paid work have played a more important role. We expand this work to consider the critical turning point of parenthood in shaping couples’ division of employment and earnings. Drawing on three U.S. nationally representative surveys, we examine the role of parenthood in spouses’ earnings correlations between 1968-2015 and ask to what extent changes in spouses’ earnings correlations are due to: (1) changes upon entry into marriage (assortative mating), (2) changes between marriage and parenthood, (3) changes following parenthood, and (4) changes in women’s employment. Our findings show that increases in the correlation between spouses’ earnings prior to 1990 came largely from changes between marriage and first birth, but after 1990 have come almost entirely from changes following parenthood. In both instances, changes in women’ employment are key to increasing earnings correlations. Changes in assortative mating played little role in either time period. An assessment of the aggregate-level implications points to the growing significance of earnings similarity after parenthood for rising income inequality across families.
  • Publication
    Change and Variation in Couples' Earnings Equality Following Parenthood
    (2021-03-31) Musick, Kelly; Gonalons-Pons, Pilar; Schwartz, Christine
    Couples’ earnings equality declines substantially following a first birth, when time commitments at home and on the labor market diverge. In the context of broad increases in gender equality and growing socioeconomic disparities along various dimensions of family life, we examine changes in within-family earnings equality following parenthood and the extent to which they have played out differently by mothers’ education. Our analysis relies on links between rich surveys and administrative tax records that provide high quality earnings data for husbands and wives spanning two years before and up to 10 years following cohorts of first births from the 1980s to the 2000s (Survey of Income and Program Participation Synthetic Beta files; N =131,400 married couples and 21,300 first birth transitions). We find that wives’ share of couple earnings declined after parenthood, changes were relatively modest over time, and these were mostly concentrated among the earliest cohort of parents. The magnitude of decline in her earnings share was substantial, dropping 13 percentage points following first birth in the 1980s and 10 percentage points in the 2000s, after accounting for time-invariant couple characteristics and year and age fixed effects. We find few differences in her earnings share changes over time by mother’s education, and we identify mothers’ employment as a key mechanism of change across education groups. Wives’ financial dependence on their husbands increases substantially after parenthood, irrespective of education and cohort, with implications for women’s vulnerability, particularly in the U.S. where divorce remains common and public support for families is weak.
  • Publication
    Work and Family Disadvantage: Mechanisms of Gender Gaps in Paid Work During the COVID-19 Pandemic
    (2022-03-15) Mertehikian, Yasmin; Gonalons-Pons, Pilar
    This article provides a comprehensive analysis of mechanisms driving the increase in gender inequality in paid work during the pandemic to address existing disagreement about the relative relevance of labor market and work-family conflict processes. Using panel data from the United States Current Population Survey (CPS), we examine four mechanisms in an integrated analysis that explicitly includes single-parent households and assesses the moderating role of women’s economic position relative to their partners. The results indicate that increases in gender inequality during the pandemic were largely driven by a direct gender mechanism in households with children and partly driven by gender differences in pre-pandemic labor market positions and the higher prevalence of women in lower earner position relative to their partners. The higher prevalence of women among single-parent households does little to contribute to increases in gender inequality despite single parents being more negatively impacted than partnered women and men.
  • Publication
    Differentiated Egalitarianism: The Impact of Paid Family Leave Policy on Women's and Men's Paid and Unpaid Work
    (2022-05-23) Gonalons-Pons, Pilar
    The birth of a new child continues to exacerbate gender specialization among different-sex couples. This study considers the potential of paid leave policies to intervene in this key life-course juncture and promote greater gender equality in paid and unpaid work. While previous research has examined the impact of paid leave policies on paid or unpaid work among mothers or fathers separately, this study provides an integrated framework and examines comprehensively how these benefits shape both mothers and fathers and both paid and unpaid work outcomes. I use data from the Current Population Survey 1990–2020 and the American Time Use Survey 2003–2019 and quasi-experimental differences-in-differences models to examine the impact of the introduction of paid leave policies in California and New Jersey. The results show that the policy increased mothers’ and fathers’ short-term time off from paid work after new births, increased mothers’ care work but not fathers’, and increased fathers’ housework but not mothers’. I call this pattern differentiated egalitarianism, denoting changes increasing men’s involvement in housework while simultaneously reproducing mothers’ primary caregiver role.
  • Publication
    Care Labor Demand Shocks and Inequality: How Childcare Costs Exacerbate Inequality among American Families
    (2022-03-15) Gonalons-Pons, Pilar; Marinescu, Ioana
    This article argues that care infrastructures can shape family income inequality and examines access to childcare services in the US as a case study. We propose that market-priced childcare systems generate inequalities in how births impact mothers’ income contributions to families and aggravate family income inequality as a result. Using the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) merged with state-level childcare prices, we estimate individual fixed effects regression models for the consequences of births on family income and on its proximate determinants: mothers’ labor supply and earnings, and partners’ labor supply and earnings. Our models include state and year fixed effects and identify the impact of childcare costs from within-state variation in childcare prices. Our analyses show that births increase family income inequality due to the negative impact of births on mothers’ earnings and that the negative impact of births on mothers’ earnings is not compensated by increases in partners’ earnings or income transfers. We find that higher childcare costs accentuate birth earnings penalties for mothers without college degrees, but not for mothers with college degrees. In all, we show that childcare costs exacerbate family income gaps between women without and with a college degree by 29 percentage points.
  • Publication
    Women’s Employment and Fertility in a Global Perspective (1960-2015)
    (2020-08-14) Behrman, Julia; Gonalons-Pons, Pilar
    Background: Scant research explores the association between women’s employment and fertility on a truly global scale due to limited cross-national comparative standardized information across contexts. Methods: The paper compiles a unique dataset that combines nationally representative country-level data on women’s wage employment from the International Labor Organization with fertility and reproductive health measures from the United Nations and additional information from UNESCO, OECD and the World Bank. This dataset is used to explore the linear association between women’s employment and fertility/reproductive health around the world between 1960 and 2015. Results: Women’s wage employment is negatively correlated with total fertility rates and unmet need for family planning and positively correlated with modern contraceptive use in every major world region. Nonetheless, evidence suggest these findings hold for non-agricultural—but not agricultural—employment only. Contribution: Our analysis documents the linear association between women’s employment and fertility on a global scale and widens the discussion to include reproductive health outcomes as well. Better understanding these empirical associations on a global scale is important for understanding the mechanisms behind global fertility change.
  • Publication
    The Impact of an Experimental Guaranteed Income on Crime and Violence
    (2020-10-02) Calnitsky, David; Gonalons-Pons, Pilar
    Would unconditional cash payments reduce crime and violence? This paper examines data on crime and violence in the context of an understudied social experiment from the late 1970s called the Manitoba Basic Annual Income Experiment, or Mincome. We combine town-level crime statistics for all medium-sized Canadian Prairie towns with town-level socio-demographic data from the census to study how an experimental guaranteed income impacted both violent crime and total crime. We find a significant negative relationship between Mincome and both outcomes. We also decompose total crime and analyze its main components, property crime and “other” crime, and find a significant negative relationship between Mincome and property crime. While the impact on property crime is theoretically straightforward, we close by speculating on the mechanisms that might link the availability of guaranteed annual income payments with a decline in violence, focusing in on the mechanisms that impact patterns of domestic violence.