Working paper
Birth Control in Russia: Overcoming the State System Resistance
According to the common definition of unemployment, the unemployed are those who are not in paid employment or self-employment, are seeking work and are available for work. А job search model is estimated from a sample of the unemployed and from some extended samples of the jobless, obtained by loosening that definition gradually. Revealed similarities and differences constitute the result of the research.
This paper is devoted to the rational behavior in the sense of the educational level choice. The theoretical model is based on the discounted flow of personal’s utility function covered the period of the education and future work. Maximizing the flow under the budget constraint we received differential equation included the rate of income grow after the acquisition of education. The solution is the Mincerian type equation. The main result of the model is that the persons with rapid growth of their earnings profile should have the smaller slope coefficients of schooling in the earnings equation. The empirical part of the research is based on the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) data set. The theoretical results have been confirmed by the regression analysis. Splitting the RLMS sample according to the respondents’ wage profiles we received that highly educated agents unlike the unskilled workers have higher income but slighter slope earnings profiles. It means that the workers expected the high growth of their incomes after the schooling are less inclined to receive higher level of education. Otherwise the persons who expected high income on the job start justify their hopes, but come across the low growth of the incomes.
Fertility transition in Russia had been completed up to the 1960s, but since then pregnancy termination remained playing a large role in birth control. Official statistics show the positive dynamics of main characteristics of reproductive health in the post-Soviet period. This development is often questioned. Based on the analysis of data from Rosstat, Russian Ministry of Health, and materials from sample surveys, mostly from 21 waves of "Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey - Higher School of Economics "(RLMS-HSE) we conclude that the official statistics of abortion are adequate. The article refutes the assumption of significant underreporting of abortions in Russia. Over the past few decades Russia has experienced contraceptive revolution, which led to a more humane way of birth control.
In this paper the public-private wage gap is estimated by means both of the OLS and the quantile regression, which will provide a more complex picture of the distribution of the public-private sector wage gap. The author finds the existence of significant public-private wage gap (about 30%) considering both observable and unobservable characteristics of workers and jobs. Using the decomposition based on quantile regression helps to answer the question about the nature of the wage differences. The author comes to the conclusion that the main reason for the gap is the institutional mechanisms of public sector wages in Russia. The analysis is based on the data from Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS-HSE) 2000-2010.
Several approaches to the concept of fatherhood present in Western sociological tradition are analyzed and compared: biological determinism, social constructivism and biosocial theory. The problematics of fatherhood and men’s parental practices is marginalized in modern Russian social research devoted to family and this fact makes the traditional inequality in family relations, when the father’s role is considered secondary compared to that of mother, even stronger. However, in Western critical men’s studies several stages can be outlined: the development of “sex roles” paradigm (biological determinism), the emergence of the hegemonic masculinity concept, inter-disciplinary stage (biosocial theory). According to the approach of biological determinism, the role of a father is that of the patriarch, he continues the family line and serves as a model for his ascendants. Social constructivism looks into man’s functions in the family from the point of view of masculine pressure and establishing hegemony over a woman and children. Biosocial theory aims to unite the biological determinacy of fatherhood with social, cultural and personal context. It is shown that these approaches are directly connected with the level of the society development, marriage and family perceptions, the level of egality of gender order.