This study describes changes in the withdrawal of sickness benefits among men and women in Sweden over a period of three decades (1994–2018), based on administrative data. During this period there was a gender gap in the takeout of sickness benefits to women’s disadvantages in all age groups as well as educational groups. The gap was particularly large between men and women with secondary education in the ages 30 to 39. The general gender gap in sickness absence is larger today compared to 1994. The development, after 2010, was mainly driven by a larger increase in sick leave among women with secondary education, both in relation to men with secondary education and in relation to women with both lower and higher levels of education. For women with secondary education, sick leave does not seem to vary according to age. Thus, in this educational group, women of child-rearing age are not more prone to take sick leave than other age groups.

A popular uprising in 2014, led to a revolution that overthrew the sitting President of Burkina Faso. We investigate if individuals' risk attitudes changed due to this revolution. We examine this impact by the main determinants of risk attitudes: gender, age and level of education. The analysis is based on unique panel survey data, allowing us to track the changes in the risk attitudes of the same individuals before, during and after the revolution. Our results suggest that individuals become risk averse during the revolution but return back to their pre-revolution risk attitudes, with a slight increase in their risk attitudes, after the revolution is over.

A common assumption in the social stratification literature is that the lion’s share of people reaches occupational maturity quite early in working life, i.e., they end up in an occupation/class position and stay there. The conventional view is that career maturity is reached around the age of 35. By using Swedish longitudinal occupational biographies across six birth cohorts from 1925 to 1984, this study challenges this view. Our findings reveal substantial career transitions throughout working life, an increase across cohorts, and a wide variation in the age of the last class transition. This suggests that careers are not in general static positions from a certain age, but fluctuate over time. There are signs of a general slowing down of career transitions across working lives, but this comes later in life and to a smaller extent than expected. These findings suggest that research often based on cross sectional data, e.g. studies on intergenerational mobility and class differences in health, need to incorporate career mobility data. More research is needed to illuminate if the results of Sweden, in terms of a low and decreasing level of occupational maturity can be replicated in other countries.

There is a conception that contemporary work lives become ever more complex. Pioneering research has indicated that work lives have indeed become more complex, yet at a modestly increasing pace. This paper uses Swedish registry data across an exceptionally long time period, including cohorts born from 1931 to 1983. The following conclusions are drawn using state-of-the-art methods of measuring sequence complexity. For early-careers, an increasing complexity trend is evident between the 1950s and 1960s birth cohorts, yet complexity fluctuates around a stable trend for the 1970s birth cohorts and onward. For mid-careers, which are considerably more stable on average, complexity has decreased among women born between the 1930s and the early-1950s. However, the opposite trend holds true for men, resulting in a gender convergence in work complexity. We observe a subsequent standstill of the mid-career complexity trend across both genders, followed by a modest decline for the last observed cohorts. Analyses point to educational expansion as an important driver of the initial increase of early-career complexity. Taken together, this study affirms an initial shift to more work life complexity in the twentieth century, yet we find no unidirectional trend toward more complexity over the last decades.

From a sociological stratification perspective, we would expect occupationally based measures to be valid proxies for lifetime earnings, but recent research suggests that annual earnings outperform occupational measures. In this article, we examine how class, occupation, education, and annual earnings are associated with lifetime earnings across almost complete working lives, at ages of around 20–65 years for Swedish cohorts born in the 1940s. Our results indicate that while annual earnings are considerably more accurate proxies for the lion’s share of working life, occupational measures are as expected more stable and somewhat better at the start and end of working lives. Our results also support the idea that micro-classes are better proxies of lifetime earnings than big classes. Contrary to some previous research, occupational measures perform better for women than for men in this respect, and occupational measures are better than education. Our main conclusions are that proxies for lifetime earnings have life-cycle biases that should be considered in, for instance, analyses of intergenerational mobility, and that occupationally based measures are more stable than annual earnings but, overall, are not very valid as indicators of lifetime earnings compared to annual earnings.

Understanding individual risk taking is an important topic in Africa, as access to financial institutions and social security is scarce, and where markets and government policies largely fail to understand investment decisions of poor households. Data on risk attitudes in Africa is limited and the available data collected might not be reliable. We investigate the determinants of risk attitudes in different domains and the reliability of survey data in a sub-Saharan African country, Burkina Faso, using a large representative panel survey of 31,677 individuals from 10,800 households. Our results show that determinants such as individual's sex and age are significantly associated with willingness to take risk. Reliability differs across determinants of risk taking and risk domains. Women, older individuals or those with high education have more reliable risk measures compared to men, younger individuals or people with low education. Risk taking in traffic has the highest test-retest reliability followed by willingness to take risk in general and financial matters.

Previous research shows that transmission of attitudes in the family is gendered. However, there are limited findings about intergenerational transmission of risk attitudes and whether it is gendered. This study replicates the findings by Dohmen et al. (Rev Econ Stud 79(2):645-677) for Germany by using quantitative data from Burkina Faso in 2014 to analyze three different self-reported risk questions. Our results show a strong intergenerational transmission of attitudes from parents to children in which positive assortative mating strengthens the parents' transmission of attitudes to her child. Mothers' transmissions are stronger for their daughters than sons. For fathers, the pattern is inverted. Our findings also show the existence of heterogeneity in intergenerational transmission within a male- and female-dominated risk domain. This supports the gender-specific role model hypothesis. Furthermore, we find support for the transmission of attitudes from the local environment to the child, but the strength and significance of this transmission decrease when controlling for parents' attitudes.

This study uses sibling correlation to provide novel descriptive evidence of parental and household characteristics on three different risk domains collected in a nationally representative survey from Burkina Faso. The sibling correlations are between 0.51 and 0.83. The correlations are higher in the general risk domain compared to risk taking in financial matters and traffic. Moreover, the sibling correlation is higher for sisters than brothers. We also explore which factors might drive these correlations; parents' risk attitudes appears to play a role in explaining these correlations, whereas socioeconomic outcomes, family structure, parental health and residential zone seems to have only a limited contribution. We also find that gender seems to be important in explaining the variation in sibling correlations. Mother's appear to have a stronger contribution on daughters than their sons correlation, whereas father's help to explain their sons correlation.

This study examines the association between sibling gender configuration and second-born sib-lings’ choice of so-called STEM educational fields (i.e., science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) in Swedish two-child families. Using population data from administrative registers in Sweden, the findings show that younger siblings, net of parental characteristics, are more likely to choose a STEM field if their older sibling has attended or is already attending a STEM program. Moreover, a gender difference is clear concerning the choice of a STEM field among younger siblings: Girls are more likely to choose a STEM field if they have an older sister who has attended a STEM program, than if they have an older brother in a similar program. However, the corre-sponding results are not found for boys. Given that STEM fields are markedly male-dominated at tertiary level, this indicates an importance of a same-sex role model for young girls contemplating gender-atypical educational choices.