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on Demographic Economics |
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Issue of 2011‒11‒07
thirteen papers chosen by Clarence Nkengne Tsimpo University of Montreal and World Bank Group |
| By: | Fernández, Raquel; Wong, Joyce Cheng |
| Abstract: | Women born in 1935 went to college significantly less than their male counterparts and married women's labor force participation (LFP) averaged 40% between the ages of thirty and forty. The cohort born twenty years later behaved very dierently. The education gender gap was eliminated and married women's LFP averaged 70% over the same ages. In order to evaluate the quantitative contributions of the many signifiant changes in the economic environment, family structure, and social norms that occurred over this period, this paper develops a dynamic life-cycle model calibrated to data relevant to the 1935 cohort. We find that the higher probability of divorce and the changes in wage structure faced by the 1955 cohort are each able to explain, in isolation, a large proportion (about 60%) of the observed changes in female LFP. After combining all economic and family structure changes, we find that a simple change in preferences towards work can account for the remaining change in LFP. To eliminate the education gender gap requires, on the other hand, for the psychic cost of obtaining higher education to change asymmetrically for women versus men. |
| Keywords: | divorce; education; gender gap; labour force participation; skill premium |
| JEL: | D91 E21 J12 J16 J22 |
| Date: | 2011–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:8627&r=dem |
| By: | Adrienne M. Lucas (Department of Economics,University of Delaware) |
| Abstract: | The malaria eradication campaign that started in Sri Lanka in the late 1940s virtually eliminated malaria transmission on the island. I use the pre-eradication differences in malaria endemicity within Sri Lanka to identify the effect of malaria eradication on fertility and child survival. Malaria eradication increased the number of live births through increasing age specific fertility and causing an earlier first birth. The effect of malaria on the transition time to higher order births is inconclusive. Malaria could directly or indirectly affect survival probabilities of live births. I exploit the particular epidemiology of malaria that causes more severe sequelae during an initial pregnancy. I find differential changes in survival probabilities by birth order that are most likely due to the direct in utero effects of malaria. The increase in population growth after malaria eradication reconciles the contradictory findings in the macroeconomic and microeconomic literatures: the increased productivity and education from malaria eradication will only appear in aggregate measures like GDP per capita after a delay because of the initial increase in the population size. |
| Keywords: | malaria, fertility, disease eradication |
| JEL: | I18 J13 O15 |
| Date: | 2011 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dlw:wpaper:11-20.&r=dem |
| By: | Bratberg, Espen (University of Bergen); Rieck, Karsten Marshall Elseth (University of Bergen); Vaage, Kjell (University of Bergen) |
| Abstract: | This paper examines the potential effect of marital disruption on intergenerational earnings mobility.We observe the earnings of children born in 1960 and 1970 along with their biological fathers and mothers. The earnings mobility between sons and daughters relative to the earnings of their mothers and fathers is estimated. Our results suggest that divorce is associated with increased mobility, except between mothers‘ and daughters‘ earnings. Transition matrices reveal that the direction of the mobility is negative; children of divorced parents tend to move downward in the earnings distribution compared to children from intact families. Finally, we utilize information on the earnings mobility of siblings in dissolved families who grew up when the family was intact. The difference between pre- and postdivorce siblings is in turn compared with sibling differences in intact families. |
| Keywords: | Intergenerational earnings mobility; divorce; gender differences |
| JEL: | C23 J12 J62 |
| Date: | 2011–06–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:bergec:2011_009&r=dem |
| By: | Pedro Gete and Paolo Porchia (Department of Economics, Georgetown University) |
| Abstract: | This paper studies children as a risky asset associated to an investment option. Children provide utility but have a stochastic maintenance cost. We obtain several new results relative to models where children are deterministic goods, among which: i) Higher child risks diminish fertility and consumption. ii) Risk aversion speeds up fertility as households use the safe utility derived from a child as insurance against fluctuations in consumption. iii) Fertility is increasing in the correlation between income and child cost shocks. The household is reluctant to have children when positive cost shocks come together with bad income shocks. The opposite result happens when children hedge income shocks. iv) The sign of the correlation determines whether higher income volatility speeds up or delays fertility. |
| Date: | 2011–01–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:geo:guwopa:gueconwpa~11-11-03&r=dem |
| By: | Stefania Marcassa (Paris School of Economics) |
| Abstract: | At the end of the 1960s, the U.S. divorce laws underwent major changes and the divorce rate more than doubled in all of the states. The new laws introduced unilateral divorce in most of the states and changes in divorce settlements in every state, such as property division, alimony transfers, and child custody assignments. The empirical literature so far has focused on the switch from consensual to unilateral divorce and found that this change cannot fully account for the increase in the divorce rate. Also, the divorce rate increased even in states where the decision remained consensual. In this paper, I consider the effects of other aspects of the legal change. I show that changes in divorce settlements provide economic incentives for both spouses to agree to divorce. Moreover, I describe a mechanism that can explain the different change in divorce rate by age of couples. I solve and calibrate a model where agents differ by gender, and make decisions on their marital status, investment and labor supply. Under the new financial settlements, divorced men gain from a favorable division of property, while women gain from an increase in alimony and child support transfers. Since both of them are better off in the new divorce setting, the existing requirement of consent for divorce (consensual or unilateral) is no longer relevant. Results show that changes in divorce settlements account for a substantial amount of the increase in the aggregate divorce rate. I also find that the increase in divorce rate of young couples with children contributes the most to the overall increase, which is consistent with the data. |
| Keywords: | Age-specific divorce rate, unilateral and consensual divorce, divorce laws, property division, alimony and child support, child custody |
| JEL: | J12 D13 K36 |
| Date: | 2011–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hka:wpaper:2011-009&r=dem |
| By: | Mario Vozar |
| Abstract: | The rapid growth of internet usage over the last two decades has been influencing many aspects of our life and most noticeably the ways in which people communicate with each other. Therefore, it is appropriate to ask whether the growth of internet usage influences individuals’ marital decisions in modern society. In my study, I concentrate on the effect of the growing internet usage on the gender and age-specific marriage hazard rate for the first time marriages in Europe. The panel data analysis reveals a negative impact of internet usage on male’s as well as female’s marriage hazard rate for those in their twenties. |
| Keywords: | marriage market; divorce; internet; |
| JEL: | J12 L8 |
| Date: | 2011–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cer:papers:wp444&r=dem |
| By: | Jonathan Fox (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany); Mikko Myrskylä (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany) |
| Abstract: | During the 1920s and early 1930s, fertility in American municipalities declined overall and with large variation between areas and across time. Using data for 1923-1932 on fertility and public spending for over 50 large cities, we show that the local government programs of health education and outdoor care of poor had the unintended effect of reducing fertility. Fixed effects regressions indicate a $4 increase in per capita public health education spending or a $37 increase in poor relief reduced the TFR by 0.1. This suggests that cities spending in the 75th percentile on health education experienced a 1.95% faster fertility decline than cities spending in the 25th percentile. For poor relief the difference was 1.45%. The mechanisms may be related to increased breastfeeding, social insurance incentives or the stressing of a two child home. The results help explain differing fertility trends, and highlight how policy may unintentionally reduce fertility. |
| Keywords: | USA, fertility, fertility decline, public health, social welfare |
| JEL: | J1 Z0 |
| Date: | 2011–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dem:wpaper:wp-2011-018&r=dem |
| By: | Olivier Bargain (Aix-Marseille Université and IZA); Olivier Donni (Université de Cergy-Pontoise); Prudence Kwenda (University College Dublin) |
| Abstract: | Poverty measures in developing countries often ignore the distribution of resources within families and the gains from joint consumption. In this paper, we extend the collective model of household consumption to recover mother's, father's and children's shares together with economies of scale, using the observation of adult-specific goods and an extended version of the Rothbarth method. The application on data from Côte d'Ivoire shows that children command a reasonable fraction of household resources, though not enough to avoid a very large extent of child poverty compared to what is found in traditional measures based on per capita expenditure. We find no significant evidence of discrimination against girls, and educated mothers have more command over household resources. Baseline results on children's shares are robust to using alternative identifying assumptions, which consolidates a general approach grounded on a flexible version of the Rothbarth method. Individual measures of poverty show that parents are highly compensated by the scale economies due to joint consumption. |
| Keywords: | Collective Model, Consumer Demand, Engel Curves, Rothbarth Method, Cost of Children, Bargaining Power, Sharing rule, Scale Economies, Equivalence Scales, Indifference Scales |
| JEL: | D11 D12 D31 I31 J12 |
| Date: | 2011–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hka:wpaper:2011-031&r=dem |
| By: | Fairlie, Robert W.; Hoffmann, Florian; Oreopoulos, Philip |
| Abstract: | This paper uses detailed administrative data from one of the largest community colleges in the United States to quantify the extent to which academic performance depends on students being of similar race or ethnicity to their instructors. To address the concern of endogenous sorting, we use both student and classroom fixed effects and focus on those with limited course enrolment options. We also compare sensitivity in the results from using within versus across section instructor type variation. Given the computational complexity of the 2-way fixed effects model with a large set of fixed effects we rely on numerical algorithms that exploit the particular structure of the model’s normal equations. We find that the performance gap in terms of class dropout and pass rates between white and minority students falls by roughly half when taught by a minority instructor. In models that allow for a full set of ethnic and racial interactions between students and instructors, we find African-American students perform particularly better when taught by African-American instructors. |
| Keywords: | Higher Education, Student Outcomes and Skills, Teacher and Student Interactions, Economics of Minorities and Races, Discrimination, 2-way Fixed Effect |
| JEL: | I20 I23 J24 J71 |
| Date: | 2011–10–27 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ubc:clssrn:clsrn_admin-2011-27&r=dem |
| By: | Astghik Mavisakalyan |
| Abstract: | Women lag behind men in many domains. Feminists have proposed that sex-based grammatical gender systems in languages reinforce traditional conceptions of gender roles, which in turn contribute to disadvantaging women. This article evaluates the empirical plausibility of this claim in the context of the labour market outcomes of women. Based on a sample of over 100 countries, the analysis shows that places where the majority language is gender-intensive have lower participation rates of women in the labour force. Individual level estimates further underscore this finding and indicate a higher prevalence of genderdiscriminatory attitudes among speakers of gender-intensive languages. |
| JEL: | J16 J21 Z10 |
| Date: | 2011–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:acb:cbeeco:2011-563&r=dem |
| By: | Julika Hillmann (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany); Anne-Kristin Kuhnt (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany) |
| Abstract: | Untersuchungen zur Kinderwunschthematik stellen bisher Individualanalysen in den Mittelpunkt, dabei wird der Partnerschaftskontext, in dem Kinder(wünsche) entstehen, vernachlässigt. Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht anhand der Befragung von 2.793 Paaren im Rahmen der „Panel Analysis of Intimate Relationships and Family Dynamics“ (pairfam) die Übereinstimmung von Paaren hinsichtlich ihrer zeitnahen Elternschaftsabsichten unter Berücksichtigung der subjektiv wahrgenommenen Partnerschaftsqualität. Demnach hat eine hohe Partnerschaftsqualität einen positiven Einfluss auf den übereinstimmenden Kinderwunsch von Paaren. Betrachtet man Eltern und kinderlose Paare separat, wird deutlich, dass Elternschaftsabsichten von Paaren mit Kindern deutlich stärker von der Partnerschaftsqualität abhängen, als die von kinderlosen Paaren. Although many studies consider fertility intentions, research almost neglects dyadic family desires. Prior micro level studies have basically ignored the dyadic nature of fertility intentions. This study uses survey data from 2.793 couples of the German „Panel Analysis of Intimate Relationships and Family Dynamics“ (pairfam) to evaluate congruent fertility intentions of couples, and considers self-perceived relationship quality in particular. The results show that high relationship quality leads to a positive impact on congruent fertility intentions of couples. If parents and childless couples are considered separately, the results clarify that fertility intentions of parents depend more strongly on the relationship quality than those of childless couples. |
| Keywords: | Germany, childless couples, family demography, family planning, parents |
| JEL: | J1 Z0 |
| Date: | 2011–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dem:wpaper:wp-2011-019&r=dem |
| By: | Pierre-André Chiappori (Columbia University); Sonia Oreffice (Universitat d'Alacant and IZA); Climent Quintana-Domeque (Universitat d'Alacant) |
| Abstract: | We develop a matching model on the marriage market, where individuals have preferences over the smoking status of potential mates, and over their socioeconomic quality. Spousal smoking is bad for non-smokers, but it is neutral for smokers, while individuals always prefer high socioeconomic quality. Furthermore, there is a gender difference in smoking prevalence, there being more smoking men than smoking women for all education levels, so that smoking women and non-smoking men are in short supply. The model generates clear cut conditions regarding matching patterns. Using CPS data and its Tobacco Use Supplements for the years 1996 to 2007, and proxying socioeconomic status by educational attainment, we find that these conditions are satisfied. There are fewer "mixed" couples where the wife smokes than vice-versa, and matching is assortative on education within smoking types of couples. Among non-smoking wives those with smoking husbands have on average 0.14 fewer years of completed education than those with non-smoking husbands. Finally, and somewhat counterintuitively, we find that, as theory predicts, among smoking husbands, those who marry smoking wives have on average 0.16 more years of completed education than those with non-smoking wives. |
| Keywords: | Smoking, education, matching, marriage market.; Smoking, education, matching, marriage market |
| JEL: | D1 J1 |
| Date: | 2011–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hka:wpaper:2011-017&r=dem |
| By: | Riovaldo Alves de Mesquita e Giacomo Balbinotto Neto |
| Date: | 2011 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:anp:en2009:215&r=dem |