I find that young female household heads who reside in the central city experience a drop in employment with increases in the suburbanization of low-skill jobs. In addition, young black women are losing employment from the relative expansion of retail trade industries, while young white women are not. While the effect of parenthood on women's work has been well documented, little attention has been given to the potentially important link between work and parenthood for men. Two competing models of fatherhood suggest opposite effects of having children on work activities. We use data from the 1992-93 National Survey of Families and Households to examine the effect of parenthood on married men and women's employment and work hours.
Findings indicate evidence for both models.
The present research demonstrates that the substantial negative association holds generally for six age groups of black females, black males, white females, and white males in the U.S., even when the amount of occupational integration for each marital status is taken into account. Hence, although the theory's predictive accuracy would exceed that of contenders even if limited to occupational integration, the findings caution against exclusion of marital integration. The theory predicts that violent culture has economic advantage in frontier areas with herding economies, because there is a chronic threat of livestock theft. Nisbett and Reaves hypothesize that rural counties in the South, where ecological conditions promote livestock herding, will have especially high white non-Hispanic male homicide rates. Our statistical analysis reproduces the mean homicide rates reported by previous research, but indicates that they are artifacts of skewed distributions, unreliable estimates of homicide rates, and the failure to control for differences in the distribution of white poverty.