ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I take a closer look at the family income buffer after men’s job losses. As depicted in the previous chapter, household composition has an important impact on income security after job loss because economic risks are pooled inside the household. In other words, if one job is lost, there may still be others who provide income in the household. In this chapter, I focus on the family income buffer after men’s job losses for two reasons: first, men’s job losses are more severe for household incomes than women’s because men are often the main earners, as depicted in the previous chapter. Second, the family income buffer after men’s job losses is more complex in terms of the intra-family structure. While the family buffer after women’s job losses mostly consists of their partners’ existing full-time earnings, as mentioned before, the family buffer among men consists of two sources that I aim to disentangle in this chapter: first, the extent to which partners already provide income before job loss; and second, increases in partners’ incomes triggered by displacements. The latter factor is known as the “added worker effect” (AWE) (Lundberg 1985). Thus, while women’s job losses cement prevalent intra-household gender division into male main earners and female supplementary earners or housekeepers, men’s job losses challenge this arrangement. The aim of this chapter is to show if and how family income buffering after men’s job losses emerges given this tension.
