The link to my full doctoral thesis, in pdf format, is available here. Below, you will find the abstract.
Employment participation of European couples: polarisation, non-standard-employment and gender and social inequalities
Abstract:
Most working-age heterosexual couples in Europe have left the male-single-earner model behind, and dual-earning has become the main form of couple employment participation. The literature documents two key related phenomena. The first is polarisation: employment participation across couples has increasingly been polarising between dual-earning and dual-workless couples, as dual-earning became the norm. The second is non-standard-employment: forms of work that depart from full-time permanent jobs have reshaped couple employment patterns, notably as a female complement to a male standard job.
There are, however, many gaps in these literatures. Most obviously, they are largely separate: we do not know how polarisation and non-standard-employment relate and interact to shape the evolution of couple employment patterns. In a world of rising non-standard-employment, conceiving polarisation merely as couples that have access to employment and others which do not, without any consideration of employment quality, seems increasingly outdated. Another limitation is the time scope: we know very little about polarisation evolutions in the past two decades, despite much relevant social and economic changes over this period. Finally, research has over-emphasised the role of non-standard-employment as a complement to a standard job in couples.
Is the evolution in couple employment participation still characterised by increasing polarisation across Europe, could this have changed and why? How do polarisation and non-standard-employment relate to each other empirically, and how do they jointly account for changing couple employment patterns? To what extent has the use of non-standard-employment in couples switched from being a complement to a standard job, to being the sole source of labour income?
I take advantage of the historical and geographical depth of the EU-LFS to answer the first two questions, with data for 27 and 11 countries respectively, as early as 1983. The third chapter is a case study of Germany, using SOEP data to assess how dual-workless couples may have increasingly turned into couples relying solely on non-standard employment following labour market reform.
This thesis makes a number of contributions. Methodologically, I propose various extensions to current techniques used to assess polarisation and its implications, such that they can incorporate the distinction between different forms of employment.
Substantially, I show that, while polarisation is higher than forty years ago in Europe, the last two decades saw a strong slow-down and potential reversal of the trend, as rising female employment started fuelling the rise of female-single-earning couples more strongly. I also find that dual-workless couples are being replaced by couples whose only source of income is from non-standard-employment, both types of couples sharing human capital disadvantages. Further, I show that standard-employment is the form of employment that has become particularly unevenly distributed over time, although different models of inequality in employment access – across all couples, across dual-earning couples only, and within dual-earning couples – emerge in Europe.
Finally, I document the rise of couples relying solely on non-standard-employment in Germany, and the increasingly segmented nature of couple employment there, but fail to find any links to the Hartz reforms, perhaps because more means-tested benefits made exits from dual-worklessness less likely. Overall, this thesis links two separate literatures to an unprecedented extent, overcoming some of their respective limits, and more generally brings together insights from economics, sociology and social policy, to better understand the evolutions of couple employment patterns and their implications for society and policy.