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Wout Ultee

Bio: Wout Ultee is an academic researcher from Radboud University Nijmegen. The author has contributed to research in topics: Occupational prestige & Unemployment. The author has an hindex of 23, co-authored 134 publications receiving 2424 citations. Previous affiliations of Wout Ultee include University of Amsterdam & Utrecht University.


Papers
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TL;DR: Effects of occupational status differences between spouses on the wife's employment and on her occupational achievement are studied for the European Union and show a tendency towards similarity in occupational similarity in marriages within marriages.
Abstract: Effects of occupational status differences between spouses on the wife's employment and on her occupational achievement are studied for the coun- tries of the European Union. The results show a tendency towards similarity in occupational sta- tus within marriages. Labor force participation of a wife is highest when her potential occupational status equals her husband's occupational status. Furthermore, the husband's occupation produces both a ceiling effect and a facilitating effect on the wife's occupational achievement. The strength of these effects differs somewhat between the countries. For a wife's participation in the labor force, these differences are related to the country's dominant religion.

28 citations

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TL;DR: In this paper, the association between the occupations of spouses is studied for eight EU countries at several points in time using data from the Eurobarometers, and they find that when the spouses belonging to a certain birth cohort grow older, their degree of occupational similarity decreases.
Abstract: Using data from the Eurobarometers, the association between the occupations of spouses is studied for eight EU countries at several points in time. Most of the association is due to a tendency towards occupational similarity between the spouses. The strength of this tendency differs somewhat between countries and decreases by about 16 per cent between 1975 and 1989, indicating that the social structure of the countries has become more open in this period. By comparing the changes in occupational homogamy of successive birth cohorts over time, we find that when the spouses belonging to a certain birth cohort grow older, their degree of occupational similarity decreases. This suggests that even within existing marriages spouses tend to become less alike between 1975 and 1989.

27 citations

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TL;DR: In this article, the impact of macro-and microeconomic uncertainty on family formation between 1970 and 2000 in The Netherlands was studied using data of the Family Survey Dutch Population, and the monthly hazard rates of experiencing the transition into first union, first marriage and parenthood after the start of the relationship of 365 male and 364 female partners by applying piecewise-constant exponential models.
Abstract: In this paper, we study the impact of macro- and micro-economic uncertainty on family formation between 1970 and 2000 in The Netherlands. Using data of the Family Survey Dutch Population, we analysed the monthly hazard rates of experiencing the transition into first union, first marriage and parenthood after the start of the relationship of 365 male and 364 female partners by applying piecewise-constant exponential models. The results show that macro-economic uncertainties, i.e. high unemployment rates, lead to postponement of the first union and marriage, but not of the first child. In addition, we found that this relationship is not interpreted by individual-level employment insecurity, i.e. temporary employment or unemployment, which does not seem to prevent people from making long-term family commitments. Although hypothesized, we did not find that the negative effects of macro- and micro-level insecurities on family formation reinforce each other or that they vary between individuals with different educational qualifications.

26 citations

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TL;DR: In the Netherlands, abortion is legal, safe, easily available, and free of charge as mentioned in this paper. Yet, it is also extremely rare, and little quantitative research into the Netherlands’ abortion practice has been done.
Abstract: In the Netherlands, abortion is legal, safe, easily available, and free of charge. Paradoxically, it is also extremely rare. Little quantitative research into the Netherlands’ abortion practice has been done. We analyse the fertile life-course of N = 3,793 Dutch women between 1954 and 2002. Using repeated event history analyses and sequential logistic regression, we test hypotheses on individual and societal effects on women’s likelihood of experiencing (unintended) pregnancies and abortions during their life-course. The most important findings pertain to the effect of policies and laws intended to regulate reproductive behaviour. During the observation period, permissive abortion legislation and higher availability of abortion services increased the likelihood that Dutch women terminated unintended pregnancies. Abortion insurance did not affect the likelihood that women terminated an unintended pregnancy. Results suggest that the legalization, availability, and insurance of contraceptive pills helped to prevent abortions, because these measures effectively reduced the demand for abortion.

25 citations


Cited by
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TL;DR: The homophily principle as mentioned in this paper states that similarity breeds connection, and that people's personal networks are homogeneous with regard to many sociodemographic, behavioral, and intrapersonal characteristics.
Abstract: Similarity breeds connection. This principle—the homophily principle—structures network ties of every type, including marriage, friendship, work, advice, support, information transfer, exchange, comembership, and other types of relationship. The result is that people's personal networks are homogeneous with regard to many sociodemographic, behavioral, and intrapersonal characteristics. Homophily limits people's social worlds in a way that has powerful implications for the information they receive, the attitudes they form, and the interactions they experience. Homophily in race and ethnicity creates the strongest divides in our personal environments, with age, religion, education, occupation, and gender following in roughly that order. Geographic propinquity, families, organizations, and isomorphic positions in social systems all create contexts in which homophilous relations form. Ties between nonsimilar individuals also dissolve at a higher rate, which sets the stage for the formation of niches (localize...

15,738 citations

Journal Article
TL;DR: A Treatise on the Family by G. S. Becker as discussed by the authors is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics.
Abstract: A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

4,817 citations

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TL;DR: The International Socio-economic Index of Occupational status (ISEI) as discussed by the authors is derived from the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO) using comparably coded data on education, occupation, and income for 73,901 full-time employed men from 16 countries.

2,121 citations