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The paper examines the correlation between patriarchal attitudes, women's asset ownership, participation in household decision-making and women's educational attainment across 27 post-communist countries. It hypothesizes that patriarchal attitudes hinder women's educational achievements while women's asset ownership and participation in household decision-making facilitate them. Utilizing regression analysis, marginal effects, post-regression simulation, the study tests and confirms these hypotheses. Results show that for every unit increase in women's asset ownership and participation in decision-making, the odds of achieving higher educational attainment increase by approximately 35.7% and 16.5%, respectively. Conversely, a unit increase in patriarchal attitudes decreases these odds by 15.8%. The findings underscore the importance of state and civil society commitment to addressing gender disparities in education.

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of contextual (community) level social trust on women’s empowerment. The specific knowledge gap explored in this study is that the previous studies theorized that community trust has a positive impact on women’s empowerment. Thus, an increase in trust in the community will empower women. However, such an assumption has been never empirically tested and confirmed. Against this backdrop, the present paper develops a theoretical argument on why the increase in community trust should lead to a higher level of women empowerment. Then, a cross-country survey was used as a data source to test the effect of community trust on women’s empowerment. A traditional single-stage OLS and instrumental variable regressions are estimated to test the effect of community trust on women’s empowerment and quantify the magnitude of such impact. The key finding of this paper is that community trust indeed significantly strengthens the empowerment of women by increasing women’s ownership of assets and improving the decision-making authority of women in the family. Importantly, our findings are robust for the separate rural and urban samples, as well as the samples of younger and older women. Equally, our findings are robust for an alternative set of instruments. The main implication of these findings is that policymakers, social administrators, and government authorities who are working on promoting gender equality should give priority to promoting community-based interventions that nurture and maintain women’s trust.

The relationship between institutional trust and entrepreneurship is not straightforward but is intertwined with social context. This study explores this relationship by estimating the relationship between entrepreneurship and institutional trust together with a set of individual social demographics and the country of residence in 27 transitional countries in Eastern Europe and countries of the former Soviet Union using the data of the 2016 Life in Transition Survey (LiTS). The analytical framework in this study is that individuals make their decisions in choosing the type of employment by weighing the level of institutional trust in their communities, a set of democratic factors and social indicators. The results of our 2SLS estimations indicate a consistent negative association between institutional trust and entrepreneurship for all the sub-datasets. However, this cannot be interpreted as evidence for the negative effect of institutional trust on entrepreneurship. Given our analytical framework, this counter common-sense phenomenon would be interpreted as when the institutional trust was high, individuals would rather choose to have a paid job instead of running their own business in these transitional countries. This study provides evidence of how far these countries have gone on the path of transition three decades after the transition.

The paper examines the correlation between patriarchal attitudes, women's asset ownership, participation in household decision-making and women's educational attainment across 27 post-communist countries. It hypothesizes that patriarchal attitudes hinder women's educational achievements while women's asset ownership and participation in household decision-making facilitate them. Utilizing regression analysis, marginal effects, post-regression simulation, the study tests and confirms these hypotheses. Results show that for every unit increase in women's asset ownership and participation in decision-making, the odds of achieving higher educational attainment increase by approximately 35.7% and 16.5%, respectively. Conversely, a unit increase in patriarchal attitudes decreases these odds by 15.8%. The findings underscore the importance of state and civil society commitment to addressing gender disparities in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: We tracked the association between generalized and institutional trust and health in 26 countries from 2006 to 2016 by covering periods before, during, and after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Methods: Our data are from 3 waves of the Life-in-Transition survey coverings 26 countries in 3 waves (2006, 2010, and 2016). Thus, in our analysis persons are simultaneously nested in countries and through time without a pure hierarchy, because our data contains 3 waves of the survey for analysis, where each wave includes 26 countries. To address these variations, we estimate a cross-classified, varying-intercept, ML linear regression model with the following 4 levels -- individual, countries, time, and countries multiplied by time. Results: There was a strong positive association between both generalized and institutional trusts and health. This effect was consistent for the whole sample, regional subsamples, and for female/male subsamples. This effect was also consistent for the whole period under investigation. Conclusions: Given the importance of generalized trust and institutional trust for health, authorities should focus on ways to build and maintain both types of trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: In this paper, we examine how self-rated health effects contribute to changes in social mobility over time. Methods: Over time changes in perceived social mobility are defined as (1) changes from 4 years ago to the present, and (2) changes from the present to 4 years in the future. A set of instrumental variable regressions is estimated to address the problems of reverse causality, omitted unobserved confounding variables, and measurement error. Results: Findings suggest that higher levels of self-rated health increase upward mobility. A one-unit increase in self-rated health leads to an increase in perceived social mobility from the past to the present by a factor of 0.368. Likewise, a one-unit increase in self-rated health leads to an increase in the expected perceived social mobility by a factor of 0.709. The results are robust for an alternative set of explanatory factors including country-level aggregated characteristics. Conclusions: Policymakers and health administrators should not ignore the effect of poor health as a significant obstacle to mobility. From the research viewpoint, classic single-stage regression models may underestimate the true magnitude of the health effect on over time changes in social mobility. Our findings also contribute to the literature on the Prospect of Upward Mobility (POUM) hypothesis by showing that health status is a strong determinant of upward mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between institutional trust and entrepreneurship is not straightforward but is intertwined with social context. This study explores this relationship by estimating the relationship between entrepreneurship and institutional trust together with a set of individual social demographics and the country of residence in 27 transitional countries in Eastern Europe and countries of the former Soviet Union using the data of the 2016 Life in Transition Survey (LiTS). The analytical framework in this study is that individuals make their decisions in choosing the type of employment by weighing the level of institutional trust in their communities, a set of democratic factors and social indicators. The results of our 2SLS estimations indicate a consistent negative association between institutional trust and entrepreneurship for all the sub-datasets. However, this cannot be interpreted as evidence for the negative effect of institutional trust on entrepreneurship. Given our analytical framework, this counter common-sense phenomenon would be interpreted as when the institutional trust was high, individuals would rather choose to have a paid job instead of running their own business in these transitional countries. This study provides evidence of how far these countries have gone on the path of transition three decades after the transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]