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on Demographic Economics |
| By: | Guillaume Blanc (Brown University) |
| Abstract: | This paper draws on a novel historical dataset crowdsourced from publicly available genealogies to study demographic change and development at the individual level in the distant past. I reconstruct fertility series, identify migration in and out of urban centers, and provide novel measures and stylized facts in a period without census and with millions of ordinary individuals observed in thirty countries. For each country, I carefully show that selection is limited in the data. Then, I document patterns of human mobility, fertility, and adult mortality in Early Modern Europe, through the Industrial Revolution and demographic transition. Finally, I present several findings at a disaggregated level suggesting that substantial and rapid changes in preferences took hold with the Age of Enlightenment and played an important role in the transition from stagnation to growth. In particular, I estimate the onset of the decline in fertility in France in the 1760s, a hundred years before the rest of Europe and earlier than previously thought, and I find a weaker intergenerational persistence of fertility behavior in Europe as early as in the late eighteenth century. |
| Keywords: | demographic,development,migration,health |
| Date: | 2020–08–26 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-02922398&r=all |
| By: | Matias Berthelon Author-Name: Diana Kruger Author-Name: Catalina Lauer Author-Name: Luca Tiberti Author-Name: Carlos Zamora |
| Abstract: | Ample empirical evidence has shown that access to childcare for preschool children increases mothers’ labor-force participation and employment. By estimating the causal effect of a school schedule reform in Chile, we investigated whether increased childcare for primary school children improved the quality of the jobs that mothers found. Combining plausibly exogenous temporal and spatial variations in school schedules with a panel of mothers’ employment between 2002 and 2015, we estimated a fixed-effects model that controlled for unobserved heterogeneity. We found a positive effect of access to full-day schools on several measures of the quality of mothers’ jobs, which were correlated to working full-time. We also found small, positive effects on the quality of fathers’ jobs. Our evidence suggests that the mechanism driving the effect was the effect of the reform’s implicit subsidy to the cost of childcare on the opportunity cost of mothers’ time. We also found that less-educated mothers benefited most from the reform. Childcare can increase household welfare by improving parents’ jobs and, thus, can play a role in reducing inequality. |
| Keywords: | Employment quality, job quality, women’s labor-force participation, women’s labor supply, full-day schooling, childcare, education reform, Chile |
| JEL: | H41 H52 I25 I28 J13 J16 J18 J22 O15 |
| Date: | 2020 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:lvl:pmmacr:2020-07&r=all |
| By: | Johnsen, Julian (Centre for Applied Research, Norwegian School of Economics); Ku, Hyejin (University College London) |
| Abstract: | Does leave-taking matter for young workers’ careers? If so, why? We propose the competition effect—relative leave status of workers affecting their relative standing inside the firm—as a new explanation. Exploiting a policy reform that exogenously assigned four-week paid paternity leave to some new fathers, we find evidence consistent with the competition effect: A worker enjoys a better post-child earnings trajectory when a larger share of his colleagues take leave because of the policy. In contrast, we find no direct earnings effect resulting from the worker’s own leave when controlling for their relative leave eligibility status within the firm. |
| Keywords: | leave of absence; career interruptions; ranking; tournament; promotion; gender gap |
| JEL: | J16 J22 J24 J31 M51 M52 |
| Date: | 2020–08–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:nhheco:2020_013&r=all |
| By: | CHIAPPORI Pierre andré; GIMÉNEZ-NADAL José ignacio; MOLINA José alberto; THELOUDIS Alexandros; VELILLA Jorge |
| Abstract: | This paper studies household labor supply, within the context of an intertemporal collective model, and three prominent intrahousehold commitment regimes: full commitment, no commitment, and limited commitment. We propose a test that distinguishes among all three alternatives based on how contemporary and historical changes to the economic environment affect household behavior. We implement the test on recent data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics in the US (1999-2017). Although couples and singles behave similarly in many aspects, couples' labor supply exhibits distinctive features that are consistent with limited commitment. We then use our results to highlight several issues and caveats that arise when testing for commitment. |
| Keywords: | Intertemporal collective model; Household labor supply; Commitment; PSID |
| JEL: | J22 |
| Date: | 2020–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:irs:cepswp:2020-11&r=all |
| By: | Brandily, Paul (Paris School of Economics); Brébion, Clément (Paris School of Economics); Briole, Simon (Paris School of Economics); Khoury, Laura (Dept. of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration) |
| Abstract: | While COVID-19 was responsible for more than 600,000 deaths worldwide as of July 24, 2020, very little is known about the socio-economic heterogeneity of its impact on mortality. In this paper, we combine several administrative data sources to estimate the relationship between mortality due to COVID-19 and poverty at a very local level (i.e. the municipality level) in France, one of the most severely hit countries in the world. We find strong evidence of an income gradient in the impact of the pandemic on mortality rates, which is twice as large in municipalities below the 25th percentile of the national income distribution than in municipalities above this threshold. We then show that both poor housing conditions and higher occupational exposure play a key role in this heterogeneity: taken together, these mechanisms account for up to 77% of the difference observed between rich and poor municipalities. |
| Keywords: | COVID-19; poverty; inequality; mortality; labor market; housing conditions |
| JEL: | I14 I18 R00 |
| Date: | 2020–08–25 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:nhheco:2020_015&r=all |