Kelly Musick
Biographic Data
| ID | 87476 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kelly Musick |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kelly |
| FAMILY NAME | Musick |
| SIGNATURE | MUSICK K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Cornell University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0329-5134 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 855 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
Partners' Long Work Hours and Changes in New Parents' Employment Over 40 Years
Income Dynamics and Income Inadequacy at the Transition to Parenthood, 1983–2019
Parenthood is an impoverishing life event for many families in America, with negative implications for healthy child development. Changes over the past four decades in public support, earnings prospects, and family arrangements of new parents have left open questions about trends in economic security and strategies for making ends meet after a first birth. Our study examined trends from 1983–2019 in the month-to-month dynamics of income and incom…
State-level gender inequality and couples’ relative earnings following parenthood over four decades
How Sexism in Institutions and Everyday Interactions Shapes Early Childbearing
Early childbearing is associated with poor outcomes for parents and children, potentially exacerbating inequality within and across generations. Building on the structural sexism and health perspective, we argue that systemic gender inequality is a conceptually important-and understudied-factor in early childbearing. Using survey data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health ( N = 5,052 female respondents and 32,595 pers…
Parents' work arrangements and gendered time use during the Covid ‐19 pandemic
Objective: This study uses time diaries to examine how parents' work arrangements shaped their time use at home and work during the COVID-19 pandemic. Background: The pandemic transformed home and work life for parents, disrupting employment and childcare. The shift to work from home offered more flexibility to manage increased care burdens, but the lack of separation between work and family also likely contributed to more challenging work enviro…
Income Sources Across Childhood in Families With Nonresident Fathers
Unpartnered mothers rely on formal and informal income sources to support their coresident minor children. Building on work focusing on selective populations and shorter time horizons, we describe the family income sources on which U.S. women and their minor children rely for up to 17 years following an unpartnered birth or union dissolution (Panel Study of Income Dynamics 2001–2017; N = 12,369 person-year records from 3,148 children). Using rich…
Telecommuting and gender inequalities in parents' paid and unpaid work before and during the Covid ‐19 pandemic
Objective: This study examines the relationship between telecommuting and gender inequalities in parents' time use at home and on the job before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Background: Telecommuting is a potential strategy for addressing the competing demands of work and home and the gendered ways in which they play out. Limited evidence is mixed, however, on the implications of telecommuting for mothers' and fathers' time in paid and unpai…
Change and Variation in U.S. Couples’ Earnings Equality Following Parenthood
In the context of broad increases in gender equality and growing socioeconomic disparities along multiple dimensions of family life, we examine changes in within‐family earnings equality following parenthood and the extent to which they have played out differently by education. Our analysis relies on links between rich surveys and administrative tax records that provide high‐quality earnings data for husbands and wives spanning two years before a…
Changes in Couples' Earnings Following Parenthood and Trends in Family Earnings Inequality
The growing economic similarity of spouses has contributed to rising income inequality across households. Explanations have typically centered on assortative mating, but recent work has argued that changes in women's employment and spouses' division of paid work have played a more important role. We expand this work to consider the critical turning point of parenthood in shaping couples' division of employment and earnings. Drawing on three U.S. …
Occupational Inflexibility and Women's Employment During the Transition to Parenthood
The typical U.S. workplace has adapted little to changes in the family and remains bound to norms of a workweek of 40 or more hours. How jobs are structured and remunerated within occupations shapes gender inequality in the labor market, and this may be particularly true at the critical juncture of parenthood. This study provides novel evidence showing how the inflexibility of occupational work hours shapes new mothers' employment. We use a fixed…
Trends in Women's Relative Earnings Within Couples Across the Transition to Parenthood in Sweden, 1987-2007
This article applies a couple perspective to assessing gender inequality in Sweden-a setting with high maternal labour force participation, a long history of family policy investment, and strong norms of gender equality. We address open questions about how couples' earnings following parenthood have changed over time, and how patterns of inequality in couples' earnings have played out across educational groups. Our study uses fixed effects method…
His and Her Earnings Following Parenthood in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom
This article advances a couple-level framework to examine how parenthood shapes within-family gender inequality by education in three countries that vary in their normative and policy context: the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom. We trace mothers' share of couple earnings and variation by her education in the 10-year window around first birth, using long-running harmonized panel surveys from the 1990s and 2000s ( N = 4,117 couples …
Young women's joint relationship, sex, and contraceptive trajectories
OBJECTIVE: We identify common patterns of joint relationship, sex, and contraceptive trajectories in young adulthood and assess how selection into these trajectories differs across socioeconomic and demographic groups and varies with earlier sexual and reproductive experiences and attitudes. METHODS: We draw on a weekly panel of 581 young adult women in the United States that includes granular data on sexual and contraceptive behaviors. We use se…
Reassessing Parents' Leisure Quality With Direct Measures of Well-Being
ObjectiveThe objective if this study was to directly assess the contamination and fragmentation of parents' leisure quality with direct measures of experienced well-being.BackgroundParents report less leisure than those without children, and the nature of their leisure differs in ways that are assumed to reflect lower quality-contaminated by the presence of children or fragmented by care work or other demands. Previous research on this question h…
Time with Grandchildren
Living Arrangements and Household Complexity among Undocumented Immigrants
Cross-National Comparisons of Union Stability in Cohabiting and Married Families With Children
Increases in cohabitation, nonmarital childbearing, and partnership dissolution have reshaped the family landscape in most Western countries. The United States shares many features of family change common elsewhere, although it is exceptional in its high degree of union instability. In this study, we use the Harmonized Histories to provide a rich, descriptive account of union instability among couples who have had a child together in the United S…
Mothers' and Fathers' Well-Being in Parenting Across the Arch of Child Development
Limited research on parental well-being by child age suggests that parents are better off with very young children despite intense time demands of caring for them. This study uses the American Time Use Survey Well-Being Module (N = 18,124) to assess how parents feel in activities with children of different ages. Results show that parents are worse off with adolescent children relative to young children. Parents report the lowest levels of happine…
Mothers' Time, the Parenting Package, and Links to Healthy Child Development
Studies show that mothers' time in particular activities with children is positively associated with child well-being, but results are mixed regarding associations between child outcomes and the sheer amount of time that mothers spend with children. Using data from three waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics Child Development Supplement (N = 2,622), the authors assess whether gains from mothers' total time with children vary by the quality …
Fertility
Nonmarital fertility, or having a child outside of marriage, has become an increasingly important phenomenon demographically and socially. The share of births to unmarried women in the United States has nearly quadrupled over the past 40 years: from 11 percent in 1970 to 41 percent in 2010. The increase in births to unmarried women living with a coresidential partner has accounted for much of the increase in nonmarital fertility in recent decades…
Siblings and children's time use in the United States
Eighty-two percent of children under age 18 live with at least one sibling, and the sibling relationship is typically the longest-lasting family relationship in an individual's life. Nevertheless, siblings remain understudied in the family demography liter
Mothering Experiences
Research studies and popular accounts of parenting have documented the joys and strains of raising children. Much of the literature comparing parents with those without children indicates a happiness advantage for those without children, although recent studies have unpacked this general advantage to reveal differences by the dimension of well-being considered and important features in parents' lives and parenting experiences. We use unique data …
How Parents Fare
The shift to more time-intensive and child-centered parenting in the United States is widely assumed to be positively linked to healthy child development, but implications for adult well-being are less clear. We assess multiple dimensions of parents' subjective well-being in activities with children and explore how the gendered nature of time potentially contributes to differences in mothers' and fathers' parenting experiences. Relying on nationa…
Gender Equity, Opportunity Costs of Parenthood, and Educational Differences in Unintended First Births
Change in the Stability of Marital and Cohabiting Unions Following the Birth of a Child
The share of births to cohabiting couples has increased dramatically in recent decades. How we evaluate the implications of these increases depends critically on change in the stability of cohabiting families. This study examines change over time in the stability of U.S. couples who have a child together, drawing on data from the 1995 and 2006–2010 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG). We parse out the extent to which change in the stability o…
How Parents Fare
The shift to more time-intensive and child-centered parenting in the United States is widely assumed to be positively linked to healthy child development, but implications for adult well-being are less clear. We assess multiple dimensions of parents' subjective well-being in activities with children and explore how the gendered nature of time potentially contributes to differences in mothers' and fathers' parenting experiences. Relying on nationa…
Reexamining the Case for Marriage
This article addresses open questions about the nature and meaning of the positive association between marriage and well-being, namely, the extent to which it is causal, shared with cohabitation, and stable over time. We relied on data from the National Survey of Families and Households (N = 2,737) and a modeling approach that controls for fixed differences between individuals by relating union transitions to changes in well-being. This study is …
His and Her Earnings Following Parenthood in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom
This article advances a couple-level framework to examine how parenthood shapes within-family gender inequality by education in three countries that vary in their normative and policy context: the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom. We trace mothers' share of couple earnings and variation by her education in the 10-year window around first birth, using long-running harmonized panel surveys from the 1990s and 2000s ( N = 4,117 couples …
Education Differences in Intended and Unintended Fertility
Using a hazards framework and panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1979-2004), we analyze the fertility patterns of a recent cohort of white and black women in the United States. We examine how completed fertility varies by women's education, differentiating between intended and unintended births. We find that the education gradient on fertility comes largely from unintended childbearing, and it is not explained by child-bea…
Planned and Unplanned Childbearing Among Unmarried Women
This paper uses data from the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth to examine social, demographic, and economic correlates of planned and unplanned childbearing among unmarried women. I look at who has births outside of marriage, who plans births outside of marriage, and how childbearing patterns vary for Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics. I find that low education increases the likelihood of planned and unplanned childbearing outside of marriage fo…
Are both parents always better than one? Parental conflict and young adult well-being
Cross-National Comparisons of Union Stability in Cohabiting and Married Families With Children
Increases in cohabitation, nonmarital childbearing, and partnership dissolution have reshaped the family landscape in most Western countries. The United States shares many features of family change common elsewhere, although it is exceptional in its high degree of union instability. In this study, we use the Harmonized Histories to provide a rich, descriptive account of union instability among couples who have had a child together in the United S…
Mothering Experiences
Research studies and popular accounts of parenting have documented the joys and strains of raising children. Much of the literature comparing parents with those without children indicates a happiness advantage for those without children, although recent studies have unpacked this general advantage to reveal differences by the dimension of well-being considered and important features in parents' lives and parenting experiences. We use unique data …
Cohabitation, nonmarital childbearing, and the marriage process
Past work on the relationship between cohabitation and childbearing shows that cohabitation increases fertility compared to being single, and does so more for intended than unintended births. Most work in this area, however, does not address concerns
Assessing Causality and Persistence in Associations Between Family Dinners and Adolescent Well-Being
Adolescents who share meals with their parents score better on a range of well-being indicators. Using 3 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health (N = 17,977), the authors assessed the causal nature of these associations and the extent to which they persist into adulthood. They examined links between family dinners and adolescent mental health, substance use, and delinquency at Wave 1, accounting for detailed measures of the…
Stability of Marital and Cohabiting Unions Following a First Birth
Variation in the Relationship Between Education and Marriage
Educational expansion has led to greater diversity in the social backgrounds of college students. We ask how schooling interacts with this diversity to influence marriage formation among men and women. Relying on data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth ( N = 3,208), we use a propensity score approach to group men and women into social strata and multilevel event history models to test differences in the effects of college attenda…
Change in the Stability of Marital and Cohabiting Unions Following the Birth of a Child
The share of births to cohabiting couples has increased dramatically in recent decades. How we evaluate the implications of these increases depends critically on change in the stability of cohabiting families. This study examines change over time in the stability of U.S. couples who have a child together, drawing on data from the 1995 and 2006–2010 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG). We parse out the extent to which change in the stability o…
Recent trends in the inheritance of poverty and family structure
Family structure, intergenerational mobility, and the reproduction of poverty
A substantial body of research has demonstrated links between poverty and family structure from one generation to the next, but has left open key questions about the implications of these associations for aggregate-level change. To what extent does intergenerational inheritance affect trends in poverty and single parenthood over time and, in particular, trends in the relative economic positions of single-parent and two-parent families? This artic…
Mothers' and Fathers' Well-Being in Parenting Across the Arch of Child Development
Limited research on parental well-being by child age suggests that parents are better off with very young children despite intense time demands of caring for them. This study uses the American Time Use Survey Well-Being Module (N = 18,124) to assess how parents feel in activities with children of different ages. Results show that parents are worse off with adolescent children relative to young children. Parents report the lowest levels of happine…
Siblings and children's time use in the United States
Eighty-two percent of children under age 18 live with at least one sibling, and the sibling relationship is typically the longest-lasting family relationship in an individual's life. Nevertheless, siblings remain understudied in the family demography liter
Neighborhood norms and substance use among teens
Time with Grandchildren
Mothers' Time, the Parenting Package, and Links to Healthy Child Development
Studies show that mothers' time in particular activities with children is positively associated with child well-being, but results are mixed regarding associations between child outcomes and the sheer amount of time that mothers spend with children. Using data from three waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics Child Development Supplement (N = 2,622), the authors assess whether gains from mothers' total time with children vary by the quality …
Change and Variation in U.S. Couples’ Earnings Equality Following Parenthood
In the context of broad increases in gender equality and growing socioeconomic disparities along multiple dimensions of family life, we examine changes in within‐family earnings equality following parenthood and the extent to which they have played out differently by education. Our analysis relies on links between rich surveys and administrative tax records that provide high‐quality earnings data for husbands and wives spanning two years before a…
Living Arrangements and Household Complexity among Undocumented Immigrants
Trends in Women's Relative Earnings Within Couples Across the Transition to Parenthood in Sweden, 1987-2007
This article applies a couple perspective to assessing gender inequality in Sweden-a setting with high maternal labour force participation, a long history of family policy investment, and strong norms of gender equality. We address open questions about how couples' earnings following parenthood have changed over time, and how patterns of inequality in couples' earnings have played out across educational groups. Our study uses fixed effects method…
Occupational Inflexibility and Women's Employment During the Transition to Parenthood
The typical U.S. workplace has adapted little to changes in the family and remains bound to norms of a workweek of 40 or more hours. How jobs are structured and remunerated within occupations shapes gender inequality in the labor market, and this may be particularly true at the critical juncture of parenthood. This study provides novel evidence showing how the inflexibility of occupational work hours shapes new mothers' employment. We use a fixed…
Changes in Couples' Earnings Following Parenthood and Trends in Family Earnings Inequality
The growing economic similarity of spouses has contributed to rising income inequality across households. Explanations have typically centered on assortative mating, but recent work has argued that changes in women's employment and spouses' division of paid work have played a more important role. We expand this work to consider the critical turning point of parenthood in shaping couples' division of employment and earnings. Drawing on three U.S. …
Planned and Unplanned Childbearing Among Unmarried Women
This paper uses data from the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth to examine social, demographic, and economic correlates of planned and unplanned childbearing among unmarried women. I look at who has births outside of marriage, who plans births outside of marriage, and how childbearing patterns vary for Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics. I find that low education increases the likelihood of planned and unplanned childbearing outside of marriage fo…
Family structure, intergenerational mobility, and the reproduction of poverty
A substantial body of research has demonstrated links between poverty and family structure from one generation to the next, but has left open key questions about the implications of these associations for aggregate-level change. To what extent does intergenerational inheritance affect trends in poverty and single parenthood over time and, in particular, trends in the relative economic positions of single-parent and two-parent families? This artic…
Recent trends in the inheritance of poverty and family structure
Fertility
Nonmarital fertility – or having a child outside of marriage – has become an increasingly important phenomenon demographically, socially, and politically. Fully one in three US births were to unmarried women in 2000, compared to just 5 percent in 1960. This change has generated a great deal of concern. Many worry because unmarried mothers tend to be younger and less advantaged socially and economically than married mothers, and their children ten…
Cohabitation, nonmarital childbearing, and the marriage process
Past work on the relationship between cohabitation and childbearing shows that cohabitation increases fertility compared to being single, and does so more for intended than unintended births. Most work in this area, however, does not address concerns
Stability of Marital and Cohabiting Unions Following a First Birth
Neighborhood norms and substance use among teens
Education Differences in Intended and Unintended Fertility
Using a hazards framework and panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1979-2004), we analyze the fertility patterns of a recent cohort of white and black women in the United States. We examine how completed fertility varies by women's education, differentiating between intended and unintended births. We find that the education gradient on fertility comes largely from unintended childbearing, and it is not explained by child-bea…
Are both parents always better than one? Parental conflict and young adult well-being
Variation in the Relationship Between Education and Marriage
Educational expansion has led to greater diversity in the social backgrounds of college students. We ask how schooling interacts with this diversity to influence marriage formation among men and women. Relying on data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth ( N = 3,208), we use a propensity score approach to group men and women into social strata and multilevel event history models to test differences in the effects of college attenda…
Assessing Causality and Persistence in Associations Between Family Dinners and Adolescent Well-Being
Adolescents who share meals with their parents score better on a range of well-being indicators. Using 3 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health (N = 17,977), the authors assessed the causal nature of these associations and the extent to which they persist into adulthood. They examined links between family dinners and adolescent mental health, substance use, and delinquency at Wave 1, accounting for detailed measures of the…
Reexamining the Case for Marriage
This article addresses open questions about the nature and meaning of the positive association between marriage and well-being, namely, the extent to which it is causal, shared with cohabitation, and stable over time. We relied on data from the National Survey of Families and Households (N = 2,737) and a modeling approach that controls for fixed differences between individuals by relating union transitions to changes in well-being. This study is …
Variation in Associations Between Family Dinners and Adolescent Well‐Being
Empirical evidence and conventional wisdom suggest that family dinners are associated with positive outcomes for youth. Recent research using fixed‐effects models as a more stringent test of causality suggests a more limited role of family meals in protecting children from risk. Estimates of average effects, however, may mask important variation in the link between family meals and well‐being; in particular, family meals may be more or less helpf…
Fertility patterns of college graduates by field of study, US women born 1960-79
Building on recent European studies, we used the Survey of Income and Program Participation to provide the first analysis of fertility differences between groups of US college graduates by their undergraduate field of study. We used multilevel event-history models to investigate possible institutional and selection mechanisms linking field of study to delayed fertility and childlessness. The results are consistent with those found for Europe in s…
Gender Equity, Opportunity Costs of Parenthood, and Educational Differences in Unintended First Births
Change in the Stability of Marital and Cohabiting Unions Following the Birth of a Child
The share of births to cohabiting couples has increased dramatically in recent decades. How we evaluate the implications of these increases depends critically on change in the stability of cohabiting families. This study examines change over time in the stability of U.S. couples who have a child together, drawing on data from the 1995 and 2006–2010 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG). We parse out the extent to which change in the stability o…
Mothering Experiences
Research studies and popular accounts of parenting have documented the joys and strains of raising children. Much of the literature comparing parents with those without children indicates a happiness advantage for those without children, although recent studies have unpacked this general advantage to reveal differences by the dimension of well-being considered and important features in parents' lives and parenting experiences. We use unique data …
How Parents Fare
The shift to more time-intensive and child-centered parenting in the United States is widely assumed to be positively linked to healthy child development, but implications for adult well-being are less clear. We assess multiple dimensions of parents' subjective well-being in activities with children and explore how the gendered nature of time potentially contributes to differences in mothers' and fathers' parenting experiences. Relying on nationa…
Fertility
Nonmarital fertility, or having a child outside of marriage, has become an increasingly important phenomenon demographically and socially. The share of births to unmarried women in the United States has nearly quadrupled over the past 40 years: from 11 percent in 1970 to 41 percent in 2010. The increase in births to unmarried women living with a coresidential partner has accounted for much of the increase in nonmarital fertility in recent decades…
Siblings and children's time use in the United States
Eighty-two percent of children under age 18 live with at least one sibling, and the sibling relationship is typically the longest-lasting family relationship in an individual's life. Nevertheless, siblings remain understudied in the family demography liter
Cross-National Comparisons of Union Stability in Cohabiting and Married Families With Children
Increases in cohabitation, nonmarital childbearing, and partnership dissolution have reshaped the family landscape in most Western countries. The United States shares many features of family change common elsewhere, although it is exceptional in its high degree of union instability. In this study, we use the Harmonized Histories to provide a rich, descriptive account of union instability among couples who have had a child together in the United S…
Mothers' and Fathers' Well-Being in Parenting Across the Arch of Child Development
Limited research on parental well-being by child age suggests that parents are better off with very young children despite intense time demands of caring for them. This study uses the American Time Use Survey Well-Being Module (N = 18,124) to assess how parents feel in activities with children of different ages. Results show that parents are worse off with adolescent children relative to young children. Parents report the lowest levels of happine…
Mothers' Time, the Parenting Package, and Links to Healthy Child Development
Studies show that mothers' time in particular activities with children is positively associated with child well-being, but results are mixed regarding associations between child outcomes and the sheer amount of time that mothers spend with children. Using data from three waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics Child Development Supplement (N = 2,622), the authors assess whether gains from mothers' total time with children vary by the quality …
Living Arrangements and Household Complexity among Undocumented Immigrants
His and Her Earnings Following Parenthood in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom
This article advances a couple-level framework to examine how parenthood shapes within-family gender inequality by education in three countries that vary in their normative and policy context: the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom. We trace mothers' share of couple earnings and variation by her education in the 10-year window around first birth, using long-running harmonized panel surveys from the 1990s and 2000s ( N = 4,117 couples …
Sociology (27 works) · Psychology (26 works) · Demography (24 works) · Family Dynamics and Relationships (24 works) · Demographic economics (22 works) · Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics (22 works) · Economics (20 works) · Population (19 works) · Demography (15 works) · Work-Family Balance Challenges (15 works)