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on Demographic Economics |
| By: | Glewwe, Paul (University of Minnesota); Huang, Qiuqiong (University of Arkansas, Fayetteville); Park, Albert (Hong Kong University of Science & Technology) |
| Abstract: | Economists have long recognized the important role of formal schooling and cognitive skills on labor market participation and wages. More recently, increasing attention has turned to the role of personality traits, or noncognitive skills. This study is among the first to examine how both cognitive and noncognitive skills measured in childhood predict educational attainment and early labor market outcomes in a developing country setting. Analyzing longitudinal data on rural children from one of China's poorest provinces, we find that both cognitive and noncognitive skills, measured when children are 9-12, 13-16, and 17-21 years old, are important predictors of whether they remain in school or enter the work force at age 17-21. The predictive power of specific skill variables differ between boys and girls. Conditioning on years of schooling, there is no strong evidence that skills measured in childhood predict wages in the early years of labor market participation. |
| Keywords: | cognitive skills, noncognitive skills, school-to-work transition, schooling, rural China |
| JEL: | I25 J16 J24 O53 |
| Date: | 2017–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp10566&r=dem |
| By: | Golsteyn, Bart H.H. (Maastricht University); Magnée, Cécile A. J. (Maastricht University) |
| Abstract: | This paper studies the causal effect of birth spacing (i.e., the age difference between siblings) on personality traits. We use longitudinal data from a large British cohort which has been followed from birth until age 42. Following earlier studies, we employ miscarriages between the first and second child as an instrument for birth spacing. The results show that a larger age gap between siblings negatively affects personality traits of the youngest child in two-child households. This result sheds a first light on the causal effects of birth spacing on personality traits. |
| Keywords: | birth spacing, family structure, personality traits |
| JEL: | J12 J13 J24 |
| Date: | 2017–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp10563&r=dem |
| By: | Neumeier, Christian (University of Konstanz); Sorensen, Todd A. (University of Nevada, Reno); Webber, Douglas A. (Temple University) |
| Abstract: | The explicit costs of raising a child have grown over the past several decades. Less well understood are the implicit costs of having a child, and how they have changed over time. In this paper we use longitudinal administrative data from over 70,000 individuals in the Synthetic SIPP Beta to examine the earnings gap between mothers and non-mothers over the lifecycle and between cohorts. We observe women who never have children beginning to out earn women who will have children during their 20s. Gaps increase monotonically over the lifecycle, and decrease monotonically between cohorts from age 26 onwards. In our oldest cohort, lifetime gaps approach $350,000 by age 62. Cumulative labor market experience profiles show similar patterns, with experience gaps between mothers and non-mothers generally increasing over the lifecycle and decreasing between cohorts. We decompose this cumulative gap in earnings (up to age 43) into portions attributable to time spent out of the labor force, differing levels of education, years of marriage and a number of demographic controls. We find that this gap between mothers and non-mothers declines from around $220,000 for women born in the late 1940s to around $160,000 for women born in the late 1960s. Over 80% of the change in this gap can be explained by variables in our model, with changes in labor force participation by far the best explanation for the declining gap. Comparing our oldest cohort as they approach retirement to the projected lifecycle behavior of the 1965 cohort, we find that the earnings gap is estimated to drop from $350,000 (observed) to $282,000 (expected) and that the experience gap drops from 3.7 to 2.1 years. We also explore the intensive margin costs of having a child. A decomposition of earnings gaps between mothers of one child and mothers of two children also controls for age at first birth. Here, we find a decline in the gap from around $78,000 for our oldest cohorts to around $37,000 for our youngest cohorts. Our model explains a smaller share of the intensive margin decline. Changes in absences from the labor market again explain a large amount of the decline, while differences in age at first birth widen the gap. |
| Keywords: | family gap, opportunity cost of children, gender pay gap |
| JEL: | J11 J13 J16 J17 |
| Date: | 2017–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp10558&r=dem |
| By: | Lange, Simon; von Werder, Marten |
| Abstract: | Proponents of tracking argue that the creation of more homogeneous classes increases efficiency while opponents fear that tracking aggravates initial differences between students. We estimate the effects on the intergenerational transmission of education of a reform that delayed tracking by two years in one of Germany’s federal states. While the reform had no effect on educational outcomes on average, it increased educational attainment among individuals with uneducated parents and decreased attainment among individuals with educated parents. The reform thus lowered the gradient between parental education and own education. The effect is driven entirely by changes in the gradient for males. |
| JEL: | I21 I24 I28 |
| Date: | 2016 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:vfsc16:145784&r=dem |
| By: | Fontana, Nicola (London School of Economics); Nannicini, Tommaso (Bocconi University); Tabellini, Guido (Bocconi University) |
| Abstract: | The Italian civil war and the Nazi occupation of Italy occurred at a critical juncture, just before the birth of a new democracy and when, for the first time in a generation, Italians were choosing political affiliations and forming political identities. In this paper we study how these traumatic events shaped the new political system. We exploit geographic heterogeneity in the intensity and duration of the civil war, and the persistence of the battlefront along the "Gothic line" cutting through Northern-Central Italy. We find that the Communist Party gained votes in the post-war elections where the Nazi occupation and the civil war lasted longer, mainly at the expense of the centrist and catholic parties. This effect persists until the early 1990s. Evidence also suggests that this is due to an effect on political attitudes. Thus, the foreign occupation and the civil war left a lasting legacy of political extremism and polarization on the newborn Italian democracy. |
| Keywords: | political extremism, path dependence, regression discontinuity design |
| JEL: | D72 C21 |
| Date: | 2017–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp10551&r=dem |
| By: | Neumeier, Christian; Sørensen, Todd; Webber, Douglas |
| Abstract: | The explicit costs of raising a child have grown over the past several decades. Less well understood are the implicit costs of having a child, and how they have changed over time. In this paper we use longitudinal administrative data from over 70,000 individuals in the Synthetic SIPP Beta to examine the earnings gap between mothers and non-mothers over the lifecycle and between cohorts. We observe women who never have children beginning to out earn women who will have children during their 20s. Gaps increase monotonically over the lifecycle, and decrease mono- tonically between cohorts from age 26 onwards. In our oldest cohort, lifetime gaps approach $350,000 by age 62. Cumulative labor market experience profiles show similar patterns, with experience gaps between mothers and non-mothers generally increasing over the lifecycle and de- creasing between cohorts. We decompose this cumulative gap in earnings (up to age 43) into portions attributable to time spent out of the la- bor force, differing levels of education, years of marriage and a number of demographic controls. We find that this gap between mothers and non-mothers declines from around $220,000 for women born in the late 1940s to around $160,000 for women born in the late 1960s. Over 80% of the change in this gap can be explained by variables in our model, with changes in labor force participation by far the best explanation for the declining gap. Comparing our oldest cohort as they approach retirement to the projected lifecycle behavior of the 1965 cohort, we find that the earnings gap is estimated to drop from $350,000 (observed) to $282,000 (expected) and that the experience gap drops from 3.7 to 2.1 years. We also explore the intensive margin costs of having a child. A decomposi- tion of earnings gaps between mothers of one child and mothers of two children also controls for age at first birth. Here, we find a decline in the gap from around $78,000 for our oldest cohorts to around $37,000 for our youngest cohorts. Our model explains a smaller share of the intensive margin decline. Changes in absences from the labor market again explain a large amount of the decline, while differences in age at first birth widen the gap. |
| Keywords: | Family Gap,Opportunity Cost of Children,Gender Pay Gap |
| JEL: | J11 J13 J16 J17 |
| Date: | 2017 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:glodps:20&r=dem |
| By: | Aaronson, Daniel (Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago); Dehejia, Rajeev (New York University); Jordan, Andrew (University of Chicago); Pop-Eleches, Cristian (Columbia University); Samii, Cyrus (New York University); Schulze, Karl (Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago) |
| Abstract: | This paper documents the evolving impact of childbearing on the work activity of mothers between 1787 and 2014. It is based on a compiled data set of 429 censuses and surveys, representing 101 countries and 46.9 million mothers, using the International and U.S. IPUMS, the North Atlantic Population Project, and the Demographic and Health Surveys. Using twin births (Rosenzweig and Wolpin 1980) and same gendered children (Angrist and Evans 1998) as instrumental variables, we show three main findings: (1) the effect of fertility on labor supply is small and often indistinguishable from zero at low levels of income and large and negative at higher levels of income; (2) these effects are remarkably consistent both across time looking at the historical time series of currently developed countries and at a contemporary cross section of developing countries; and (3) the results are robust to other instrument variation, different demographic and educational groups, rescaling to account for changes in the base level of labor force participation, and a variety of specification and data decisions. We show that the negative gradient in female labor supply is consistent with a standard labor-leisure model augmented to include a taste for children. In particular, our results appear to be driven by a declining substitution effect to increasing wages that arises from changes in the sectoral and occupational structure of female jobs into formal non-agricultural wage employment as countries develop. |
| Keywords: | labor supply, fertilty, mothers |
| JEL: | F63 F66 J00 J13 N00 |
| Date: | 2017–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp10559&r=dem |
| By: | Sylvain Dessy (Department of Economics, Université Laval, Quebec, QC); Setou Diarra (Department of Economics, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON); Roland Pongou (Department of Economics, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON) |
| Abstract: | Public intervention addressing the issue of underage marriage emphasizes policies such as girls' education and enforcement of age-of-consent laws as promising avenues for ending this harmful practice. It has been argued, however, that such policies will work better in societies where there are supported by men. Yet, there is no study analyzing the role of males' characteristics in relation to early marriage. This paper examines the causal effect of a male's education on the likelihood that he marries an underage girl. Using micro-level data from Nigeria in combination with plausible instrumental variables that address potential endogeneity issues, we find that having more years of schooling significantly reduces the probability of marrying an underage girl. Importantly, we show that this negative relationship is not a mere mechanical effect reflecting the endogeneity between schooling and marriage-timing decisions. Moreover, we find that this relationship is weaker in communities where norms that cast women in submissive roles are stronger. We develop a model that explains this causal effect as resulting from the complementarity between father's and mother's education in the production of child quality. |
| Keywords: | Underage Marriage; Male Education; Nigeria; Patriarchal Norms. |
| JEL: | J12 J13 O12 |
| Date: | 2017 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ott:wpaper:1704e&r=dem |
| By: | Byker, Tanya; Gutierrez, Italo A. |
| Abstract: | We evaluate the impact of a female sterilization campaign implemented by the Peruvian government in 1996 and 1997 that we estimate impacted nearly 70,000 women. We use an inverse probability weighting (IPW) estimator that accounts for contamination in the available data. The contamination arises because while we observe sterilization status, we do not know if a given sterilization occurred as part of the campaign or whether it was chosen without influence from the campaign. The distinction is important because women targeted by the campaign and women who opted for sterilization outside of the campaign likely differ in many aspects, and we suspect the impact of sterilization is different for each group. We show that it is not necessary to fully observe whether a sterilized woman underwent the procedure because of the campaign to estimate unbiased average treatment effect of the government campaign. It is sufficient to estimate--based on auxiliary data--the conditional probability that if a sterilization is observed, it occurred because of the campaign. Using the proposed IPW estimator, we find that women sterilized because of the campaign had on average fewer 0.95 children. We also find substantial and statistically significant improvements in the height for age--a measure of health--of girls whose mothers were sterilized because of the campaign, and small but positive and statistically significant effects on years of schooling for boys. |
| Keywords: | female sterilization, fertility, family planning, contaminated data models, inverse probability weighting, casual effects, observational data |
| JEL: | C21 J13 |
| Date: | 2016–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ran:wpaper:1118-1&r=dem |
| By: | Paul Gregg (Department of Social & Policy Sciences, University of Bath); John Jerrim (Department of Social Science, UCL Institute of Education, University College London); Lindsey Macmillan (Department of Social Science, UCL Institute of Education, University College London); Nikki Shure (Department of Social Science, UCL Institute of Education and Institute of Labor Economics) |
| Abstract: | The proportion of children living in a jobless household is a key indicator of social exclusion across Europe. Yet there is little existing evidence on the extent to which this measure of childhood deprivation is associated with later life outcomes. We use two harmonised cross-national data sources, the European Survey of Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) from 2011 and the Programme for International Student Attainment (PISA) from 2012, to address this question. We consider the association between children experiencing jobless households and three medium- and long-term outcomes: education, adult worklessness and adult poverty. We find evidence of large penalties to experiencing a jobless household in childhood across all three outcomes in some countries while in other countries there is no longer-term consequences of this indicator of social exclusion. Countries with high levels of children in jobless households such as the UK, Belgium and Ireland typically have more severe penalties for the medium- and longer-term outcomes of those children, although this varies by gender. This research suggests that this is a powerful measure of social exclusion, predicting severely limited life chances for the next generation. |
| Keywords: | PISA; Worklessness; Joblessness; Poverty; Intergenerational mobility; Education inequality |
| JEL: | J62 J64 I32 I24 |
| Date: | 2017–03–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:qss:dqsswp:1705&r=dem |