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on Demographic Economics |
| By: | Horrell, Sara; Humphries, Jane; Weisdorf, Jacob |
| Abstract: | Malthus believed that rising real wages encouraged earlier marriage, higher fertility and a growing population. But diminishing returns in agriculture meant that an organic economy could not keep pace. Excess labour and rising food prices drove wages down and brought population growth to a halt. Studies testing this hypothesis have focussed on the relationship between population growth and men’s wages, typically overlooking women and children’s economic activities and influence on demographic outcomes. New daily and annual wage series, including women and children, enable these missing actors to be incorporated into a more complete account of Malthus’s hypothesis. New findings emerge: the demographic reaction to wage changes was gendered. Early-modern bachelors responded to rising male wages by marrying earlier, whereas spinsters responded to rising female wages by delaying marriage. Our evidence suggests that women played a key role in England’s low- fertility demographic regime and escape from the Malthusian trap. More tentatively, we consider the demographic regime in medieval England. Although marriage was related to earnings, the size of the population was a forceful determinant of economic outcomes. While superficially similar in terms of the prevalence of late marriage and low nuptiality, this regime was consolidated by poverty and social control absent the female agency of the later era. |
| JEL: | N33 |
| Date: | 2020–10–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:105553&r= |
| By: | Cristina Borra; Libertad González; David Patiño |
| Abstract: | We study the effects of maternal age on infant health. Age at birth has been increasing for the past several decades in many countries, and correlations show that health at birth is worse for children born to older mothers. In order to identify causal effects, we exploit school entry cutoffs and the empirical finding that women who are older for their cohort in school tend to give birth later. In Spain, children born in December start school a year earlier than those born the following January, despite being essentially the same age. We show that as a result, January-born women finish school later and are (several months) older when they marry and when they have their first child. We find no effect on educational attainment. We then compare the health at birth of the children of women born in January versus the previous December, using administrative, population-level data, and following a regression discontinuity design. We find small and insignificant effects on average weight at birth, but the children of January-born mothers are more likely to have very low birthweight. We interpret our results as suggestive of a causal effect of maternal age on infant health, concentrated in the left tail of the birthweight distribution, with older mothers more likely to give birth to (very) premature babies. |
| Keywords: | maternal age, infant health, school cohort |
| JEL: | I12 J12 J13 |
| Date: | 2021–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bge:wpaper:1276&r= |
| By: | Jonas Jessen |
| Abstract: | This paper examines how culture impacts within-couple gender inequality. Exploiting the setting of Germany's division and reunification, I compare child penalties of couples socialised in a more gender-egalitarian culture (East Germany) to those in a gender-traditional culture (West Germany). Using a household panel, I show that the long-run child penalty on the female income share is 26.9 percentage points in West German couples, compared to 15.5 in East German couples. I additionally show that among women in West Germany the arrival of a child leads to a greater increase in housework and a larger share of child care responsibilities than among women in the East. A battery of robustness checks confirms that differences between East and West socialised couples are not driven by current location, economic factors, day care availability or other smooth regional gradients. I add to the main findings by using time-use diary data from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and reunified Germany, comparing parents with childless couples of similar age. This provides a rare insight into gender inequality in the GDR and allows to compare the effect of children in the GDR to the effects in East and West Germany after reunification. Lastly, I show that attitudes towards maternal employment are more egalitarian among East Germans, but that the arrival of children leads to more traditional attitudes for both East and West Germans. The findings confirm that socialisation has a strong impact on child penalties and thus on gender inequality as a whole. |
| Keywords: | cultural norms, gender inequality, child penalty |
| JEL: | J16 J22 D1 |
| Date: | 2021 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:diw:diwwpp:dp1957&r= |
| By: | Richard Foltyn; Jonna Olsson |
| Abstract: | This paper explores how heterogeneity in life expectancy, objective (statistical) as well as subjective, affects savings behavior between healthy and unhealthy people. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, we show that people in poor health not only have shorter actual lifespan, but are also more pessimistic about their remaining time of life. Using a standard overlapping-generations model, we show that differences in life expectancy can explain one third of the differences in accumulated wealth with an important part driven by pessimism among unhealthy people. |
| Keywords: | Life expectancy, preference heterogeneity, subjective beliefs, life cycle |
| JEL: | D15 E21 G41 I14 |
| Date: | 2021–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:gla:glaewp:2021_13&r= |
| By: | Savelyev, Peter A. (College of William and Mary); Ward, Benjamin C. (University of Georgia); Krueger, Robert F. (University of Minnesota); McGue, Matt (University of Minnesota) |
| Abstract: | We analyze data from the Minnesota Twin Registry (MTR), combined with the Socioeconomic Survey of Twins (SST), and new mortality data, and contribute to two bodies of literature. First, we demonstrate a beneficial causal effect of education on health and longevity in contrast to other twin-based studies of the US population, which show little or no effect of education on health. Second, we present evidence that parents compensate for differences in their children's health endowments through education, but find no evidence that parents reinforce differences in skill endowments. We argue that there is a bias towards detecting reinforcement both in this paper and in the literature. Despite this bias, we still find statistical evidence of compensating behavior. We account for observed and unobserved confounding factors, sample selection bias, and measurement error in education. |
| Keywords: | health, education, intrafamily resource allocation, skill endowment, health endowment, longevity, twin study, Minnesota Twin Registry |
| JEL: | I12 I14 I24 J13 J24 |
| Date: | 2021–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp14600&r= |
| By: | Alessandro Cigno |
| Abstract: | This paper reviews the literature concerning the evolution of cultural traits in general and preferences in particular, and the emergence and persistence of rules or norms, from a family per-spective. In models where every new person is effectively the clone of an existing one (either a parent or anyone else), there may be evolution only in the demographic sense that the share of the population who hold a certain trait increases or decreases. Evolution in the strict sense of new traits making their appearance occurs in models where the trait characterizing any given member of any given generation is a combination of traits drawn at random from those represented in the previous generation. Preferences may be altruistic or non-altruistic, but individuals may behave as if they were altruistic even if they are not, because a rule or norm may make it in their interest to do so. Evolutionary stability and renegotiation proofness play analogous roles, the former by selecting altruistic preferences, and the latter by selecting cooperation-inducing rules. |
| Keywords: | evolution, preferences, family rules, social norms, socialization, matching, hold-up problem |
| JEL: | Z10 C78 D01 D02 D13 J13 |
| Date: | 2021 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_9226&r= |