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A varying number of work hours from week to week creates considerable hardships for workers and their families, like volatile earnings and work–family conflict. Yet little empirical work has focused on racial/ethnic differences in varying work hours, which may have increased substantially in the Great Recession of the late 2000s. We extend literatures on racial/ethnic stratification in recessions and occupational segregation to this topic. Analyses of the Survey of Income and Program Participation show varying weekly hours became significantly more common for White and Black, but especially Latino workers in the late 2000s. The growth of varying weekly hours among White and Latino workers was greatest in predominantly minority occupations. However, the growth among Black workers was greatest in predominantly White occupations. The chapter discusses implications for disparities in varying hours and the salience of occupational composition beyond earnings.

Research on the social determinants of health demonstrates that workers who feel insecure in their jobs suffer poorer health as a result. However, relatively few studies have examined the relationship between job insecurity and illegal substance use, which is closely related to health. In this study, we develop a theoretical model focusing on two intervening mechanisms: health and life satisfaction. Additionally, we examine differences in this relationship between women and men. We test this model using logistic regression models of substance use for women and men based on longitudinal data from the National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States. The results indicate that job insecurity is associated with a significantly higher probability of illegal substance use among women but not men. We interpret this as further evidence of the gendering of precarious employment. This relationship is not channeled through health or life satisfaction, but there is evidence that job insecurity has a stronger association with illegal substance use for women with poorer overall health.

Discrete choice models based on cross-sectional data have the important limitation of not considering habit and inertia effects and this may be especially significant in changing environments; notwithstanding, most demand models to date have been based on this type of data. To avoid this limitation, we started by building a mode choice panel around a drastically changing environment, the introduction of a radically new public transport system for the conurbation of Santiago de Chile. This paper presents the formulation and estimation of a family of discrete choice models that enables to treat two main elements: (i) the relative values of the modal attributes, as usual, and (ii) the shock resulting from the introduction of this radical new policy. We also analyse the influence of socioeconomic variables in these two forces.

We found that introducing this drastic new policy may even modify the perception of attribute values; in fact, the changes can be different among individuals, as socioeconomic characteristics act as either enhancers or softeners of the shock effects generated by the new policy.

The purpose of this paper was to examine the robustness of the findings on educational advantage among sexual minority men.

Using nationally representative data (AddHealth) and controlling for other predictors of academic attainment, we examine the educational attainment of sexual minority males by using hierarchical regression and logistical regression for two measures of sexual identity.

We find robust differences in educational attainment across analyses and sexual orientation constructs. Our results show sexual minority identity predicts up to a year more of education for male respondents and consistently reporting male homosexuals have an even greater advantage, more than one and a half years, compared to inconsistent responders.

Our results extend previous research on educational outcomes for nonheterosexual adolescents, suggesting there are sustained differences in long-term educational outcomes for nonheterosexual adults and supporting earlier analyses of the AddHealth survey data. This study contributes to the existing literature by examining educational attainment as measured by continuous years and cut-points, using two measures of sexual orientation, providing estimates for all Wave 4 sexual minority identities (i.e., not collapsing any sexual minority category), and controlling for adolescent school geography and type. Moreover, we find early identification of sexual orientation and stability of sexual orientation may be an important source of variation in identifying LGBTQ adolescents who are at greater academic risk or who may benefit from increased social support.

Purpose — This study proposes an optimal survey design method for multi-day and multi-period panels that maximizes the statistical power of the parameter of interest under the conditions that non-linear changes in response to a policy intervention over time can be expected.

Design/methodology/approach — The proposed method addresses balances among sample size, survey duration for each wave and frequency of observation. Higher-order polynomial changes in the parameter are also addressed, allowing us to calculate optimal sampling designs for non-linear changes in response to a given policy intervention.

Findings — One of the most important findings is that variation structure in the behaviour of interest strongly influences how surveys are designed to maximize statistical power, while the type of policy to be evaluated does not influence it so much. Empirical results done by using German Mobility Panel data indicate that not only are more data collection waves needed, but longer multi-day periods of behavioural observations per wave are needed as well, with the increase in the non-linearity of the changes in response to a policy intervention.

Originality/value — This study extends previous studies on sampling designs for travel diary survey by dealing with statistical relations between sample size, survey duration for each wave, and frequency of observation, and provides the numerical and empirical results to show how the proposed method works.

The graduate field of conflict resolution is composed of an eclectic mix of programs, departments, centers, institutes, and think tanks which conduct a wide range of theory development, basic and applied research, service and teaching functions. Prior research on the graduate field has been limited mainly to either direct comparisons between a few graduate programs or summaries of progress made by program clusters, with the largest being a study of 18 programs. The composition and activities of the graduate field as a whole are not well understood, yet are hotly debated. This research attempts to fill part of this knowledge gap by specifically examining all known graduate programs in Peace Studies (PS), Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) and Conflict Resolution (CR) in the United States that award verifiable graduate credentials (i.e., certificates, masters, or doctoral degrees) in PS, ADR, or CR. The participants in this study therefore constitute the entire known population (N=94) of graduate credential granting programs in the United States that collectively award roughly 164 certificate and/or degree options. The results of this study constitute a baseline from which to specifically examine and compare program factors including: program location, size, student composition, faculty credentials and areas of expertise. This study also examines program content, including curriculum content, design, and delivery, areas of training specialization; and those elements that participants report make their programs unique. These and other results provide a means of comparing program types and individual program innovations in regard to curriculum, service, research agendas, and areas of practice. The study concludes with participants’ ideas on what program development trends we can expect to see in the coming years as well as where the academy is or is not meeting social needs.

The paper analyses the effects of individual and household characteristics on current poverty status, while controlling for initial conditions, past poverty status and unobserved heterogeneity in 14 European countries for the period 1994–2001, using the European Community Household Panel. The distinction between true state dependence and individual heterogeneity has important policy implications, since if the former is the main cause of poverty it may be crucial to break the ‘vicious circle’ of poverty using income-supporting social policies, whereas if it is the latter anti-poverty policies should focus primarily on education, training, development of personal skills and other labour market oriented policies. The empirical results are similar in qualitative terms but rather different in quantitative terms across the EU countries covered in the paper. State dependence remains significant in all model specifications, even after controlling for unobserved heterogeneity or when removing possible endogeneity bias. Higher poverty rates and higher poverty persistence are associated with particular welfare state regimes, although the link is substantially weakened when other explanatory variables are included in the analysis.