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on Demographic Economics |
| By: | SHAPIRO David; TENIKUE Michel |
| Abstract: | Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) was the last major world region to experience the fertility decline that all industrialized countries have gone through and that much of the developing world has experienced in large part. It has uniquely high fertility: at present, the United Nations estimates the total fertility rate at 5.1 for SSA, compared to 2.2 for both Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean. The ongoing fertility transition in the region has been comparatively slow and subject to stalling. At the same time, women?s educational attainment and infant and child mortality have been shown in the demography literature to be important determinants of fertility and fertility decline. Since the 1980s, fertility in sub-Saharan Africa has been falling in many countries while women?s school enrollment and educational attainment have been increasing and infant and child mortality for the most part has been declining. Previous research using aggregated data has shown the importance of growth in women?s schooling and reduction in infant and child mortality as major factors contributing to fertility decline in the region. This research uses individual-level micro data and a well-known decomposition technique for analyzing differences or changes to quantify the importance of increased women?s education and declining infant and child mortality in contributing to the observed declines in fertility in numerous countries. More specifically, this paper examines the quantitative impact of these two factors in sub-Saharan Africa in contributing to the ongoing decline in fertility that has been taking place in the region. Data come from 31 countries, and are from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS). The methodology is to decompose observed changes in fertility to changes attributable to different factors, including the two key variables of interest ? women?s education and infant and child mortality ? and two control variables, urbanization and age. |
| Keywords: | Women's Education; Infant and Child Mortality; Fertility Decline; Sub-Saharan Africa; Decomposition Analysis |
| Date: | 2015–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:irs:cepswp:2015-07&r=dem |
| By: | Idaira Rodríguez-Santana (Centre for Health Economics, University of York, UK.); Martin Chalkley |
| Abstract: | Objective. To analyse the distribution of socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of medical trainees across different specialties in the UK. Design. Mixed logistic regression analysis of data from the National Training Survey 2013 to quantify evidence of systematic relationships between doctors’ characteristics and the specialty they are training in, controlling for the correlation between these characteristics. Setting. Data from the National Training Survey 2013, carried out by the General Medical Council. Participants. Postgraduate medical trainees. Main outcome measures. Odds ratios (calculated for both all trainees and a subsample of UK educated trainees) relating gender, age, ethnicity, place of studies, socioeconomic background and parental education to a trainee’s specialty. Results. There are systematic and substantial differences between specialties in respect of gender, ethnicity, age and socio-economic background. Being male, white British, from a better-off socioeconomic background, trained in a UK university or having parents who have tertiary education increases the chances of being in surgical specialties relative to general practice. Being male, nonwhite, mature, trained in an overseas university, from a better-off socio-economic background, or having parents who have tertiary education increases the chances of being in psychiatric specialties relative to general practice. Measured relative to general practice the gender gap is largest for surgical specialities, the ethnicity gap is greatest for acute care, emergency medicine and anaesthetics and the age-gap is large and positive for psychiatry and large and negative for acute care, emergency medicine and anaesthetics. Conclusions. Differences in the characteristics of trainees will feed into the composition of the practising profession. The persistent gender gap, the underrepresentation of those coming from the disadvantaged backgrounds and the inequity of educational background in some specialties will condition perceptions of the NHS and the medical profession. Our analysis contributes to a fuller understanding of the nature of these differences, which may be a matter for public concern and policy action. Remedial action if required will necessitate a better understanding of the processes of selection and self-selection into specialties that gives rise to these observed differences |
| Date: | 2015–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:chy:respap:119cherp&r=dem |
| By: | Michele Raitano (Department of Economics and Law, Sapienza University of Rome); Francesco Vona (OFCE SciencesPo and SKEMA Business School) |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates the influence of parental education on the returns to experience of Italian men using a new longitudinal dataset that contains detailed information on individual working histories. Our favourite panel estimates indicate that an additional year of parental education increases sons' weekly wages by 11.7% after twenty years of experience and that 71% of this effect emerges during the career. We show that this effect holds irrespective of individual abilities, and it appears the result of both a glass ceiling effect, due to the complementarity between parental education and son’s abilities, and a parachute effect, associated with family labour market connections. |
| Keywords: | Intergenerational Inequality, Parental Education, Experience-Earnings profiles, Human Capital |
| JEL: | J62 J24 J31 |
| Date: | 2015–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fem:femwpa:2015.74&r=dem |
| By: | Garrouste, Clémentine; Godard, Mathilde |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates whether leaving school in a bad economy deteriorates health in the long-run. It focuses on individuals in England and Wales who left full-time education in their last year of compulsory schooling immediately after the 1973 oil crisis. Unemployment rates sharply increased in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis, so that between 1974 and 1976, each school cohort faced worse economic conditions at labour-market entry than the previous one. Our identification strategy relies on the comparison of very similar pupils – born the same year and with a similar quantity of education (in months) – whose school-leaving behaviour in different economic conditions was exogeneouly implied by compulsory schooling laws. Unlike school-leavers who did postpone their entry on the labour market during the 1980s and 1990s recessions, we provide evidence that pupils’ decisions to leave school at compulsory age immediately after the 1973 oil crisis were not endogeneous to the contemporaneous economic conditions at labour market entry. We use a repeated cross section of individuals over 1983-2001 from the General Household Survey (GHS) and take a lifecourse perspective, from 7 to 26 years after school-leaving. Our results show that poor economic conditions at labour-market entry are particularly damaging to women’s health. Women who left school in a bad economy are more likely to report poorer health and to consult a general practitioner over the whole period under study (1983-2001). Additional evidence suggests that they are also more likely to suffer from a longstanding illness/disability over the whole period. As for men, the health impact of poor economic conditions at labour-market entry is more mixed, and not robust across all specifications. However, we never find that leaving school in a bad economy is beneficial to their health. Finally, our results show that leaving school in a bad economy does not have a lasting impact on labour-market outcomes from 7 to 26 years after school-leaving, neither for men, nor for women. |
| Keywords: | health, school-leaving, macroeconomic shocks |
| Date: | 2015–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpm:docweb:1509&r=dem |
| By: | Lavy, Victor (University of Warwick, Hebrew University and NBER); Sand, Edith (Bank of Israel) |
| Abstract: | In this paper, we estimate the effect of primary school teachers’ gender biases on boys’ and girls’ academic achievements during middle and high school and on the choice of advanced level courses in math and sciences during high school. For identification, we rely on the random assignments of teachers and students to classes in primary schools. Our results suggest that teachers’ biases favoring boys have an asymmetric effect by gender-positive effect on boys’ achievements and negative effect on girls’. Such gender biases also impact students’ enrollment in advanced level math courses in high school—boys positively and girls negatively. These results suggest that teachers’ biased behavior at early stage of schooling have long run implications for occupational choices and earnings at adulthood, because enrollment in advanced courses in math and science in high school is a prerequisite for post-secondary schooling in engineering, computer science and so on. This impact is heterogeneous, being larger for children from families where the father is more educated than the mother and larger on girls from low socioeconomic background |
| Keywords: | JEL Classification: |
| Date: | 2015 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cge:wacage:254&r=dem |
| By: | Philip Verwimp |
| Abstract: | The contribution looks at the gap in labour market and school outcomes between first and second generation migrants and non-migrants in European countries. It correlates these socio-economic data with the number of foreign fighters per million inhabitants. Far from offering a full, causal and micro-level model to understand the story completely, the contribution finds a clear and robust pattern across Europe. |
| Keywords: | exclusion; labor markets; PISA test scores; europe; terrorism |
| JEL: | J70 O50 I20 |
| Date: | 2015–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:eca:wpaper:2013/221722&r=dem |
| By: | Abel, Jaison R. (Federal Reserve Bank of New York); Deitz, Richard (Federal Reserve Bank of New York) |
| Abstract: | Though labor market conditions steadily improved following the Great Recession, underemployment among recent college graduates continued to climb, reaching highs not seen since the early 1990s. In this paper, we take a closer look at the jobs held by underemployed college graduates in the early stages of their careers during this period. We show that relatively few recent graduates were working in low-skilled service jobs, and that many of the underemployed worked in fairly well paid non-college jobs requiring some degree of knowledge and skill. We also find that the likelihood of being underemployed was lower for those with technically oriented and occupation-specific majors than it was for those with degrees in more general fields. Moreover, our analysis suggests that underemployment is a temporary phase for many recent college graduates as they transition to better jobs after spending some time in the labor market, particularly for those who start their careers in low-skilled service jobs. |
| Keywords: | college graduates; college major; great recession; labor market dynamics; STEM; underemployment |
| JEL: | I23 J23 J24 J62 |
| Date: | 2015–12–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:fednsr:749&r=dem |