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This article provides evidence on the relationship between fathers’ labor market outcomes and number of children. Using data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions and instrumental variable models, this study examines how family size is related to fathers’ probability of employment, number of paid working hours, job rank, wages, and job stability across European countries with diverse social beliefs about men’s financial and caregiving responsibilities. Results show that having a larger family is associated with increases in fathers’ share of paid working hours, chances of having a permanent contract and a managerial position, and wages. These findings are, however, largely due to selection. Net of selection, fathers tend to increase paid working hours and are more likely to be promoted after childbirth only in countries where they are considered the main income providers, and acceptance of involved fatherhood is weak. The magnitude of these effects is small, however.

In this study, we examine whether the long-term structural changes in the labour market, driven by automation, affect fertility. The adoption of industrial robots is used as a proxy for these changes. It has tripled since the mid-1990s in the EU, tremendously changing the conditions of participating in the labour market. On the one hand, new jobs are created, benefitting largely the highly skilled workers. On the other hand, the growing turnover in the labour market and changing content of jobs induce fears of job displacement and make workers continuously adjust to new requirements (reskill, upskill, increase work efforts). The consequences of these changes are particularly strong for the employment and earning prospects of low and middle-educated workers. Our focus is on six European countries: Czechia, France, Germany, Italy, Poland and the UK. We link regional data on fertility and employment structures by industry from Eurostat (NUTS-2) with data on robot adoption from the International Federation of Robotics. We estimate fixed effects linear models with instrumental variables in order to account for the external shocks which may affect fertility and robot adoption in parallel. Our findings suggest robots tend to exert a negative impact on fertility in highly industrialised regions, regions with relatively low educated populations and those which are technologically less advanced. At the same time, better educated and prospering regions may even experience fertility improvements as a result of technological change. The family and labour market institutions of the country may further moderate these effects.

Low bone mineral density (BMD) is common in patients with hemophilia (PWHs). The aim of the present study was to describe BMD and microarchitecture in PWHs in Northern Germany and to determine factors contributing to possible skeletal alterations. Demographic characteristics, BMD and microarchitecture, bone metabolism markers, and orthopaedic joint score (OJS) were assessed during routine check-ups. Areal BMD was assessed by dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) at the hip and lumbar spine. Volumetric BMD and microarchitecture were quantified by high-resolution peripheral quantitative computed tomography at the distal radius and tibia. Eighty male PWHs (median age, 33 years; range, 18–77) were retrospectively analyzed, of whom 67 (84.0%) and 13 (16.0%) had hemophilia A and B, respectively. Fifty-four (68.0%), six (7.0%), and 20 (25.0%) patients had severe, moderate, or mild hemophilia, and 35 (44.0%) were hepatitis C virus (HCV) positive. DXA analysis revealed low BMD (Z-score ≤ − 2.0) in 27.5% of PWHs, and higher bone turnover values were associated with lower BMD. Bone microarchitecture was dominated by cortical deficits at the radius and trabecular deficits at the tibia. Cortical deficits at the radius were influenced by lower body mass index, low-grade inflammation, and treatment regimen (higher cortical thickness on primary prophylaxis). Trabecular alterations at the tibia were mainly associated with OJS and HCV status. A positive effect of self-reported sportive activity on BMD could be shown. In conclusion, our findings demonstrate that the site-specific microarchitectural deficit observed in PWHs is primarily negatively influenced by poor joint status, inflammation, HCV infection, and high bone turnover.

This article provides insights into employment decisions of mothers and mothers-to-be in a post-socialist Poland around the entry to the EU. Previous studies for this country continuously pointed to a strong determination among mothers to be employed during the economic transformation, despite increasing obstacles to combining paid work with childrearing over the 1990s. We analyse in-depth interviews to explore women's motives to work for pay. We investigate how these motives are related to women's childbearing experiences and intentions. Our analyses show that motherhood was central in women's lives at this point in Polish history, but females sought to combine it with employment. We also find that women's perceptions about their ability to balance work and motherhood were strongly related to the meanings that they attached to paid work.

Mothers tend to receive lower wages than comparable childless women. This 'motherhood wage gap' has been reported in numerous studies. We summarize the existing empirical evidence on this topic using meta-analysis and test for several mechanisms which can be responsible for the persistence of the wage gap. Based on 208 wage effects of having exactly one child and 245 wage effects of the total number of children, we find an average motherhood wage gap of around 3.6-3.8%. While the gaps associated with the total number of children are mostly explained by the loss of mothers' human capital during child-related career breaks, the gaps associated with one child are predominantly driven by mothers' choice of jobs and occupations that pay less. The residual gap is smallest in Nordic countries, where public policies actively support gender equality and reconciliation of work and family, as well as Belgium and France, and largest in the post-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe and Anglo-Saxon countries.

In haemophilia, thrombin generation and fibrin deposition upon vascular injury critically depend on the tissue factor (TF)-driven coagulation pathway. TF expression by monocytes/macrophages and circulating microvesicles contributes to haemostasis, thrombosis and inflammation. Inflammation is a hallmark of blood-induced joint disease. The aim of this study is to correlate TF production by whole-blood monocytes with inflammatory markers and clinical parameters in patients with moderate-to-severe haemophilia A or B (n = 43) in comparison to healthy males (n = 23). Monocyte TF antigen and microvesicle-associated TF procoagulant activity (MV TF PCA) were measured immediately after blood draw (baseline) and following incubation of whole blood with buffer or lipopolysaccharide (LPS) using two-colour flow cytometry and chromogenic FXa generation assay, respectively. Patients with HIV or uncontrolled HBV/HCV infections were excluded. TF was hardly detectable and not different in baseline and buffer-treaded samples from both groups. Stimulation with LPS, however, induced monocyte TF production, with increased TF-specific mean fluorescence intensity (P = 0.08) and MV TF PCA (P P n = 16), who were older and also had a significantly worse orthopaedic joint score than patients with no history of viral hepatitis (P

While existing research has documented complexities in biographies of childless women, few studies to date have systematically examined the life-course pathways of the childless from a comparative, cross-country perspective. In this paper, we analyse biographies of childless women in four countries-Germany, Italy, Poland, and the United States-in order to investigate whether pathways into childlessness are country-specific or commonly shared across institutional, cultural, and geographical settings. Partnership, education, and employment histories are examined using sequence analysis with dynamic Hamming distance and cluster analysis. Discrepancy analysis indicates a country-effect in women's biographies although life-course patterns identified in each country share similarities. Overall, seven life-course trajectories have been identified, with the most numerous cluster comprising single, working women who completed their education at a relatively young age. The results highlight a marked variation in the life-courses of childless women. Put together, these findings provide descriptive evidence for both country-specificity and cross-country similarity in the pathways to childlessness.The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10680-022-09624-5.

We explore whether social mobility influences fertility behavior, using multiple comparative layers to better observe structural and individual-level mechanisms at work. We locate this study in Poland and Russia during periods of socialism and capitalism. Applying event-history analysis techniques to longitudinal micro-data, we find evidence of a relationship between mobility and second birth risks for women only. Status enhancement aims seem the most plausible link between mobility and childbearing. The relationship appears moderated by the economic context, which we interpret as being related to differential selection into upward and downward mobility based on labor market opportunities. In general, the suppressing effect of upward mobility on second birth risks was stronger in the poorer economic context of Russia, whereas the increased second birth risks related to downward mobility were heightened in Poland’s more prosperous context.

The country-specific conditions for work and family reconciliation (family policies, labour market structures and gender norms) are believed to influence tensions between paid employment and childbearing. So far there have been very few attempts to quantify these conditions into a single measure which would allow for comparisons across countries of the magnitude of the barriers that working parents encounter. Such a quantitative index could also facilitate a quantitative investigation of the association between the macro-level conditions for work and family reconciliation and fertility at the individual level. In this paper, we seek to fill this gap by proposing a quantitative index of country-specific conditions for work and family reconciliation, which may be used, for example, in a two-level regression framework. The index takes into account all three components of the conditions for work and family reconciliation. We also perform a series of uncertainty and sensitivity analyses which verify the robustness of our assumptions and which illustrate the range of the index volatility.

As self-employment offers greater flexibility compared to wage and salary contracts, women might choose it to achieve a better work-family balance. Past empirical research on this topic yielded equivocal results, however. We add to this discussion and provide evidence for Poland. Public support for working parents in Poland is relatively poor and women need to develop strategies in order to combine work and care. Running one’s own business might be such a strategy. We adopt a life-course perspective and investigate whether self-employment encourages childbearing and whether women who have already given birth are more likely to opt for self-employment. We estimate multi-process hazard models, using the Generations and Gender Survey. We find that self-employment neither affects women's fertility decisions nor does it attract mothers on wage and salary contracts. Nevertheless, it is chosen by non-employed mothers as it may be the only opportunity for them to enter the labour market.

We provide new evidence on the education-fertility relationship by using EU-SILC panel data on 24 European countries to investigate how couples' educational pairings predict their childbearing behavior. We focus on differences in first-, second-, and third-birth rates among couples with varying combinations of partners' education. Our results show important differences in how education relates to parity progressions depending on the education of the partner. First, highly educated homogamous couples show a distinct childbearing behavior in most country clusters. They tend to postpone the first birth most and display the highest second- and third-birth rates. Second, contrary to what may be expected based on the "new home economics" approach, hypergamous couples with a highly educated male and a lower-educated female partner display among the lowest second-birth transitions. Our findings underscore the relevance of interacting both partners' education for a better understanding of the education-fertility relationship. ispartof: Demography vol:55 issue:4 pages:1195-1232 ispartof: location:United States status: published

Celem niniejszych badań było określenie aktywności antyoksydacyjnej ekstraktów z ziarna 30 odmian pszenicy ozimej oraz zawartości w nich polifenoli ogółem. Niniejszy cel realizowano poprzez analizę prób naturalnie porażonych określanych, jako kontrolne wzrastających w warunkach bez ochrony chemicznej oraz prób inokulowanych grzybami z rodzaju Fusarium. Stwierdzono, iż ekstrakty otrzymane z 30 odmian pszenicy wykazują zróżnicowaną aktywność antyutleniającą. Analiza statystyczna wyników wykazała wyższą aktywność prób inokulowanych mierzoną za pomocą zdolności do wygaszania wolnego rodnika ABTS• w porównaniu do prób kontrolnych. Zawartość polifenoli ogółem natomiast nie różniła się istotnie między próbami kontrolnymi i inokulowanymi. W czasie niniejszych badań nie stwierdzono istotnej zależności pomiędzy zawartością polifenoli w ekstraktach, a aktywnością przeciwutleniającą.

Grain of 30 winter wheat cultivars was screened for the content of seven flavonoids (apigenin, kaempferol, luteolin, naringenin, quercetin, rutin, vitexin). In total, 90 samples were analyzed, belonging to three combinations: the control, samples inoculated with Fusarium culmorum, and samples inoculated with Fusarium culmorum and protected with fungicides (Prosaro, Topsin M). Analyzed flavonoids were detected in all tested samples. The highest concentrations were recorded for quercetin (512.9 mg/kg) and luteolin (458.4 mg/kg). Concentration of all compounds was the highest in the inoculated samples, while in the control and in the inoculated samples treated with fungicides their contents were significantly lower and similar, as confirmed by the statistical analysis conducted by multivariate methods. In most cases, significant correlations were obtained between individual flavonoids. Such correlations were observed for all flavonoids in samples covering all the three variants and almost all flavonoids in the inoculated samples. The lowest number of correlations was recorded for samples treated with fungicides.

In this paper, we look into how country-specific factors shape the interrelationship between childbearing and women’s labor supply. To this end, we compare Italy and Poland, two low-fertility countries where the country-specific obstacles to work and family reconciliation are similarly strong but which differ in the history of women’s labor supply and the extent to which couples’ material aspirations are satisfied by men’s earnings. Our findings show that women’s employment clearly conflicts with childbearing in Italy, while in Poland women tend to combine the two activities, despite the similar difficulties they face. These results challenged the standard microeconomic explanations and point to the importance of other country-specific factors, apart from conditions for work and family reconciliation, in shaping women’s employment and fertility decisions, such as economic incentives or culturally rooted behavioral patterns. Overall, our study provides thus foundations for explaining the variation in the relationship between women’s employment and fertility in an enlarged Europe.

Many empirical studies find that parents are not as happy as non-parents or that parenthood exerts a negative effect on subjective well-being (SWB). We add to these findings by arguing that there is a key moderating factor that has been overlooked in previous research, i.e. the level of work–family conflict. We hypothesize that the birth of a child means an increase in the level of work–family tension, which may be substantial for some parents and relatively weak for others. To outline such an approach, we estimate fixed-effects models using panel data from the Household, Income and Labor Dynamics in Australia survey. We find that childbearing negatively affects SWB only when parents, mothers in particular, face a substantial work–family conflict, providing thus support for our hypothesis.

As a result of low fertility and ageing populations, reconciling work and family has become a prominent topic in demographic research. Numerous macro-level studies on this topic have found that the cross-country correlation between total fertility and women’s labour force participation has changed from negative to positive in Western European economies (Ahn and Mira, 2002; Engelhardt and Prskawetz, 2004; Kogel, 2004). The micro-level relationship between the two roles has mostly been found to be negative, although its magnitude varies depending on the country studied (Matysiak and Vignoli, 2008). The economic theory of fertility and women’s labour supply explains this phenomenon by the cross-country differences in the opportunity costs of childbearing, such as the income lost during the non-participation period, but also future earnings foregone due to non-accumulation and depreciation of human capital (Walker, 1995; Gustafsson, 2001). These costs are larger in countries with rigid labour markets and a pronounced insider-outsider divide, and those that lack safety nets and family policies oriented towards supporting a successful reconciliation of motherhood and paid work (Esping-Andersen, 1999).

In the recent decade demographers turned their attention to investigating the effects of children on self-rated happiness or life satisfaction. The underlying idea of this strand of research is to find out whether it pays off for individuals to become parents in terms of their subjective well-being, given the costs of having children. Following this line of research, this article studies the impacts of childbearing on individual-level happiness in Poland; a country which experienced a rapid decline in fertility despite the particularly strong attachment of young Poles to family values. To this end, we applied methods for panel data analysis which allowed us to control for endogeneity of subjective well-being and parenthood. Our results reveal a significantly positive effect of the first child on the subjective well-being of mothers. For men, this impact is weaker and most likely temporary since it weakens with the child’s increasing age. An important finding is that neither for men nor for women does the positive impact of parenthood rise with an increase in parity. This may explain the persistence of low fertility in this country.

This paper provides an overview of developments in fertility, family policy models, and intensity of work-family tensions in the CEE region in the 1990s and 2000s. It hypothesises that the intensification of work-family incongruities in the 1990s might have been an important determinant of the decline in fertility seen in postsocialist countries in the 1990s, and that the implementation of reconciliation policies in some of the post-socialist countries in the 2000s might have led to diversity in rates of fertility improvement in the region. It concludes by encouraging more in-depth research on the interrelationships between fertility, women’s employment, family policies and social norms regarding women’s work in the CEE region, all of which would help verify these hypotheses.

One of the most urgent tasks faced by researchers investigating toxigenic fungi is to describe the kinetics of fungal metabolite formation after infestation with these fungi. For this purpose the formation of Fusarium toxins and fungal biomass markers (ERG, ATP) were analyzed after infection of three wheat cultivars (Sumai 3, Torka, Griwa) with two isolates of F. culmorum forming DON, and NIV and DON, respectively. Concentrations of the above mentioned metabolites were determined in grain and chaff in the period of 6 weeks from spike inoculation until complete maturity of grain. Results indicate considerable diversification in terms of all analyzed traits, i.e. cultivars, isolates and kinetic curves of metabolite formation, which suggests conclusions concerning resistance of wheat to ear blight. Recorded data undoubtedly are a significant contribution to the understanding of fungal metabolite formation in infected plants.

The aim of this article is to examine how (i) children and (ii) the existence and potential earnings of husbands affect women's employment patterns in West Germany, East Germany, and Poland. In particular, it assesses whether employment patterns in East Germany and Poland resemble those exhibited in West Germany after the collapse of the socialist regime. Given the considerable changes to labour market and family policies experienced by post-socialist countries that have resulted in an increased conflict between family and work, this is an important area of research. In the post-socialist countries, we find differences in female employment patterns compared to West Germany, expressed in the lower magnitude of child and husband effects. We argue that women in Poland and East Germany are going their own way, rejecting the ‘male breadwinner’ model, and only partly adjusting their behaviour to changing structural conditions.

Our research objective was to systematise the existing literature on the relation between fertility and women’s employment at the micro-level. Instead of carrying out a traditional literature review, we conducted a meta-analysis. This allowed us to compare estimates from different studies standardised for the country analysed, the method applied, control variables used and sample selected. We focused on two effects: the impact of work on fertility and the impact of young children on employment entry. First, we found a high variation in the studied effects among the institutional settings, reflecting the existence of a north–south gradient. Second, we observed a significant change in the effects over time. Finally, we demonstrated that a failure to account for the respondent’s social background, partner and job characteristics tends to produce a bias in the estimated effects.

Background: Previous studies have shown that in Poland cohabitation is most of all a transitory step or a testing period before marriage. Polish law does not recognize this living arrangement and it has been portrayed as uncommitted and short-lived. However, few studies have investigated what cohabitation means for relationships, especially with respect to freedom. Objective: We explore how young people in Poland understand and evaluate freedom in cohabitation. We investigate how they view the role freedom plays in couple dynamics and in relationship development. Methods: We analyze data from focus group interviews conducted in Warsaw with men and women aged 25-40. We identify passages in which opinions on cohabitation and marriage are discussed, and use bottom-up coding and the constant comparative method to reconstruct different perspectives on the issue of freedom in cohabitation. Results: The respondents argued that cohabitation offers the partners freedom to leave a union at any time with few repercussions. On the negative side, the freedom related to cohabitation brings insecurity, especially for young mothers. On the positive side, it offers relaxed conditions for testing a relationship, grants partners independence, and encourages cohabitors to keep their relationship interesting, precisely because it is fragile and easy to dissolve. Conclusions: The open nature of cohabitation offers benefits to partners, but does not provide secure conditions for childbearing. As long as the couple is not planning to have children, however, the benefits of cohabitation are likely to be seen as outweighing the disadvantages.

This paper contributes to the discussion on the effects of single motherhood on happiness. We use a mixed-method approach. First, based on indepth interviews with mothers who gave birth while single, we explore mechanisms through which children may influence mothers' happiness. In a second step, we analyze panel survey data to quantify this influence. Our results leave no doubt that, while raising a child outside of marriage poses many challenges, parenthood has some positive influence on a lone mother's life. Our qualitative evidence shows that children are a central point in an unmarried woman's life, and that many life decisions are taken with consideration of the child's welfare, including escaping from pathological relationships. Our quantitative evidence shows that, although the general level of happiness among unmarried women is lower than among their married counterparts, raising a child does not have a negative impact on their happiness.

This paper contributes to the discussion on the effects of childbearing on fathers’ labour market opportunities in Europe. We use instrumental variable models and data from EU-SILC to examine the cross-country variation in the causal effects of family size on the labour market outcomes of fathers. We provide an overview of the impact of family size on the employment careers of fathers, as measured on a range of dimensions: the probability of work, the number of working hours, the job rank and level of pay, and the degree of job stability based on the type of employment contract. Our findings indicate that men increase their number of working hours and earnings in response to having more children, but that the stability of men’s employment contracts does not change. These effects are prevalent across all European countries, but they are somewhat stronger in more conservative societies in which men are expected to be the main breadwinners, and they are weaker in egalitarian societies in which men are expected to participate in household and family duties.

This paper contributes to the discussion on the effects of the number of children on female employment in Europe. Previous research has usually either (1) compared these effects across countries assuming exogeneity of family size or (2) used methods which deal with endogeneity of family size but focused on single countries. We combine these two approaches by taking a cross-country comparative perspective and applying quasi-experimental methods. We use instrumental variable models, with multiple births as instruments, and the harmonized data from the European Survey on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC). We first examine the cross-country variation in the effects of family size on maternal employment across the groups of European countries with similar welfare state regimes. Next, to measure the impact of welfare state regimes in a more precise way, we implement the Index for the Conditions of Work and Family Reconciliation, i.e. a synthetic indicator that captures the impact of family policies, social norms and labour market conditions. This step gives us an opportunity to investigate whether the revealed cross-country differences in the magnitude of the effect of the family size on maternal employment can be attributed to the diversity of European institutional arrangements as well as cultural and structural conditions for combining employment and family duties.

A large number of empirical studies have investigated the effects of women's education on union dissolution in Europe, but results have varied substantially. This paper seeks to assess the relationship between educational attainment and the incidence of marital disruption by systematizing the existing empirical evidence. A quantitative literature review (a meta-analysis) was conducted to investigate the temporal change in the relationship, net of inter-study differences. The results point to a weakening of the positive educational gradient in marital disruption over time and even to a reversal in the direction of this gradient in some countries. The findings also show that the change in the educational gradient can be linked to an increase in access to divorce. Finally, the results suggest that women's empowerment has played an important role in changing the educational gradient, while the liberalization of divorce laws has not.

The paper investigates whether self-employment, which generally offers greater flexibility with respect to the hours and place of work, is chosen by women in order to achieve a better balance between paid work and family. The empirical research on this topic has provided conflicting evidence. The shortcomings of previous studies are discussed and accounted for. First, we investigate women's self-employment choices in relationship with childbearing and childrearing, and we apply qualitative methodology to examine the motives that trigger these decisions. Second, in the quantitative part of the study, we investigate the direction of the relationship by analyzing whether self-employment encourages childbearing, or whether motherhood leads women to choose a more flexible form of employment. Finally, we account for the selection of mothers into the group of self-employed due to time-constant unobserved characteristics. Our results show that self-employment does not affect women's fertility decisions, but it can become an attractive option for women after they have children because of the flexibility it offers. Nevertheless, self-employment does not seem to be preferred to W&S contracts. Instead, it is seen as an alternative to being jobless or in a "bad job" (i.e., one that is inflexible, stressful, or demanding).

Available online 3 June 2015 Remaining childless is a process which is influenced by the continuously changing context in which an individual woman lives, and by the many choices she makes in various life spheres over her life course. Most previous studies on this issue have compared mothers and childless women at the end of their reproductive years, and have sought to identify the primary reasons for childlessness by regressing measures of accumulated experience of life events on the probability of having no children. Such an approach does not allow us to capture the wide variety of paths to childlessness. Using sequence analysis we reconstruct the major life course trajectories of childless women and reveal the complexity of the life paths that lead to childlessness in the urban populations of Italy and Poland. We conclude that more reflection is needed when designing studies on childlessness, and that we will be unable to understand the complexities of the process of remaining childless unless better data and methods are implemented in these studies.

The country-specific conditions for work and family reconciliation have been theoretically and empirically acknowledged to constitute important determinants of fertility and women’s employment. So far, however, there have been very few attempts to quantify these conditions into a single measure which would allow for comparisons across countries of the magnitude of the barriers encountered by working parents. The lack of such a quantitative index precludes the rigorous quantitative testing of the impact of the country-specific conditions for work and family reconciliation on women’s fertility and employment behaviors. It also leaves researchers with no option other than to conduct simplistic analyses in which family policies or attitudinal regimes are linked with the outcomes of women’s fertility and employment choices in a descriptive manner. In this paper, we seek to fill this gap by proposing a quantitative index of conditions for work and family reconciliation (ICWFR). The index takes into account family policy measures, labor market structures, and gender norms that have been theoretically argued and empirically shown to be relevant for women’s fertility and employment choices. We also perform a series of uncertainty and sensitivity analyses which verify the robustness of the ICWFR to our assumptions, and which illustrate the range of the index volatility.

This paper provides an overview of developments in fertility, family policy models, and intensity of work-family tensions in the CEE region in the 1990s and 2000s. It hypothesises that the intensification of work-family incongruities in the 1990s might have been an important determinant of the decline in fertility seen in post-socialist countries in the 1990s, and that the implementation of reconciliation policies in some of the post-socialist countries in the 2000s might have led to diversity in rates of fertility improvement in the region. It concludes by encouraging more in-depth research on the interrelationships between fertility, women’s employment, family policies and social norms regarding women’s work in the CEE region, all of which would help verify these hypotheses.