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on Demographic Economics |
| By: | Sanna Bergvall (University of the Gothenburg); Nuria Rodriguez-Planas (Queens College – CUNY & IZA, University of Barcelona & IEB) |
| Abstract: | Most empirical studies indicate that becoming a mother is an augmenting factor for the perpetration of intimate partner violence (IPV). Using rich population-wide hospital records data from Sweden, we conduct a stacked DiD analysis comparing the paths of women two years before and after the birth of their first child with same-age women who are several quarters older when giving birth to their first child and find that, in contrast to the consensus view, violence sharply decreases with pregnancy and motherhood. This decline has both a short-term and longer-term component, with the temporary decline in IPV covering most of the pregnancy until the child is 6 months old, mimicking a temporary decrease in hospital visits for alcohol abuse by the children’s fathers. The more persistent decline is driven by women who leave the relationship after the birth of the child. Our evidence is not supportive of alternative mechanisms including suspicious hospitalizations, an overall reduction in hospital visits or selection in seeking medical care, mothers’ added value as the main nurturer, or mothers’ drop in relative earnings within the household. Our findings suggest the need to push for public health awareness campaigns underscoring the risk of victimization associated with substance abuse and to also provide women with more support to identify and leave a violent relationship. |
| Keywords: | Motherhood, stacked Difference-in-Differences model, event study, individual fixed effects, administrative longitudinal records data, population-wide estimates. |
| JEL: | J12 J13 |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ieb:wpaper:doc2024-09 |
| By: | Gørtz, Mette; Sander, Sarah; Sevilla, Almudena |
| Abstract: | This paper compares the labor market trajectories of grandparents before and after the arrival of their first grandchild. We find gender gaps in earnings of 4 and 10 percent five and ten years, respectively, after the first grandchild. These effects are driven by changes in women's labor supply at both the intensive and extensive margin. We provide evidence from multiple data sources that grandmothers’ caregiving complements formal daycare, thereby offering essential flexibility for young parents. We document that grandchild penalties were larger in earlier periods characterized by low availability of daycare, shorter parental leave, and an earlier retirement age. Linking register data to geographical variations in daycare centers reveals that local daycare coverage is not associated with grandchild penalties. Detailed time use data show that grandmothers carry larger responsibilities for childcare than grandfathers. Recognizing the complementary nature of grandmaternal childcare is important for the design of policies attempting to reduce child penalties for both mothers and grandmothers. |
| Keywords: | female labor supply; gender; grandchildren; inequality; retirement |
| JEL: | N0 R14 J01 |
| Date: | 2025–02–28 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:126874 |
| By: | Dora Costa; Lars Olov Bygren; Benedikt Graf; Martin Karlsson; Joseph Price |
| Abstract: | Explanations for the West's escape from premature mortality have focused on chronic malnutrition or income and on public health or state capacity. We argue that by ignoring the multigenerational effects of variance in ancestors' harvests, we are underestimating the contribution of modern economic growth to the escape from early death at older ages. Using a newly constructed multigenerational dataset for Sweden, we show that grandsons' longevity was strongly linked to spatial shocks in paternal grandfathers' yearly harvest variability when agricultural productivity was low and market integration was limited. We reason that an epigenetic mechanism is the most plausible explanation for our findings. We posit that the removal of trade barriers, improvements in transportation, and agricultural innovation reduced harvest variability. We contend that for older Swedish men (but not women) born 1830-1909 this reduction was as important as decreasing contemporaneous infectious disease rates and more important than eliminating exposure to poor harvests in-utero. |
| JEL: | I15 J11 N33 |
| Date: | 2025–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:33343 |
| By: | Cristina Bellés-Obrero (Universitat de Barcelona & IEB); Sergi Jiménez-Martín (Universitat Pompeu Fabra); Han Ye (University of Mannheim) |
| Abstract: | This paper studies the mortality effect of delaying retirement by investigating the impacts of the 1967 Spanish pension reform, which affected the general population and exogenously changed the early retirement age, depending on the date individuals started contributing to the pension system. Using the Spanish administrative data, we find that delaying retirement by one year increases the hazard of dying between the ages of 60 and 69 by 38 percent. We show that the reform leads to higher mortality in all subgroups, and the effects are statistically stronger for those employed in sectors with the highest workplace accidents and for those with low selfvalue jobs. Moreover, we show that allowing flexible retirement mitigates the adverse effects of delaying retirement. |
| Keywords: | Delaying Retirement, Mortality, Heterogeneity, Work Conditions |
| JEL: | I10 I12 J14 J26 |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ieb:wpaper:doc2024-07 |
| By: | David Lagakos; Stelios Michalopoulos; Hans-Joachim Voth |
| Abstract: | What does it take to live a meaningful life? We exploit a unique corpus of over 1, 400 life narratives of older Americans collected by a team of writers during the 1930s. We combine detailed human readings with large language models (LLMs) to extract systematic information on critical junctures, sources of meaning, and overall life satisfaction. Under specific conditions, LLMs can provide responses to complex questions that are indistinguishable from those of human readers, effectively passing a version of the Turing Test. We find that sources of life meaning are more varied than previous research suggested, underlining the importance of work and community contributions in addition to family and close relationships (emphasized by earlier work). The narratives also highlight gendered disparities, with women disproportionately citing adverse family events, such as the loss of a parent, underscoring their role as keepers of the kin. Our research expands our understanding of human flourishing during a transformative period in American history and establishes a robust and scalable framework for exploring subjective well-being across diverse historical and cultural contexts. |
| JEL: | I31 N0 O10 P00 Z10 |
| Date: | 2025–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:33373 |
| By: | Choukhmane, Taha; Coeurdacier, Nicolas; Jin, Keyu |
| Abstract: | We investigate whether the "one-child policy" has contributed to the rise in China's household saving rate and human capital in recent decades. In a life-cycle model with intergenerational transfers and human capital accumulation, fertility restrictions lower expected old-age support coming from children - inducing parents to raise saving and education investment in their offspring. Quantitatively, the policy can account for at least 30% of the rise in aggregate saving. Using the birth of twins under the policy as an empirical out-of-sample check to the theory, we find that quantitative estimates on saving and education decisions line up well with micro-data. |
| Keywords: | AAM requested |
| JEL: | D10 D91 E21 |
| Date: | 2023–06–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:119964 |
| By: | Ran Abramitzky; Leah Platt Boustan; Osea Giuntella |
| Abstract: | Immigrant enclaves offer valuable ethnic amenities but may delay assimilation. We study enclave formation in the Age of Mass Migration by using the centralized location decisions for “ethnic” Catholic churches. After a church opening, same-ethnicity residents of chosen neighborhoods experienced falling earnings but strengthened communal ties, as compared to residents of areas matched on baseline characteristics. Treated residents held more manual occupations, and increased in-group marriage and naming. These effects persist into the second generation and are not observed for non-ethnic neighbors. Consistent with the historical record, Poles organized communal life around neighborhood parishes, but Italians were less church-centered. |
| JEL: | N92 R23 |
| Date: | 2025–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:33362 |
| By: | Nuria Rodriguez-Planas (Queens College – CUNY & IZA, University of Barcelona & IEB); Alan Secor (CUNY Research Foundation & Illinois Institute of Technology) |
| Abstract: | Have the recent changes in reproductive rights changed women’s perceptions of discrimination and fair treatment relative to men’s perceptions? To address this question, we collected online survey data (N=1, 374) during spring 2023 using a randomized design that provided information about the enactment of State antiabortion laws and the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court to a treatment group but no information to an untreated control group. This exogenous variation in information dissemination was used to analyze perceived fairness and discrimination of treated individuals, by sex. We find that treatment increases women’s overall perception of discrimination and unfair treatment in the US by 11.5 percent of a standard deviation and their perception relative to men by 21.8 percent of a standard deviation, widening an already existing gender gap. These results support the notion that the recent state and federal abortion restrictions can impact individuals’ perceptions of fairness and discrimination in the U.S. and do so differentially by gender. |
| Keywords: | State and federal abortion restrictions, gender, perceived discrimination and fairness, rights protection, randomized information treatment. |
| JEL: | J15 J16 I K36 |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ieb:wpaper:doc2024-13 |
| By: | Arellano-Bover, Jaime (Yale University); Bianchi, Nicola (Northwestern University); Lattanzio, Salvatore (Bank of Italy); Paradisi, Matteo (Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance) |
| Abstract: | This paper studies the interaction between the decrease in the gender pay gap and the stagnation in the careers of younger workers, analyzing data from the United States, Italy, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Our findings highlight the importance of labor-market entry to understand the shrinking of the gender pay gap. The entire decline in the aggregate pay gap originates from (i) newer worker cohorts who enter the labor market with smaller-than-average gender pay gaps and (ii) older worker cohorts who exit with higher-than-average gender pay gaps. Convergence at labor-market entry originates primarily from younger men's positional losses in firms' hierarchies and the overall pay distribution. We propose an explanation by which a larger supply of older workers can crowd out younger workers from a limited number of top-paying positions. These negative career spillovers disproportionately affect the career trajectories of younger men because they were more likely than younger women to hold higher-paying jobs at baseline. Consistent with this aging-driven crowd-out interpretation, younger men experience the largest positional losses within the hierarchies of firms that are more exposed to workforce aging. These findings hold after controlling for alternative explanations for the progressive closure of the gender pay gap at labor-market entry. Finally, we document that labor-market exit has been the sole contributor to the decline in the gender pay gap after the mid-1990s, indicating that without structural breaks, the closure of the gender pay gap is unlikely in the foreseeable future. |
| Keywords: | gender gap, workforce aging, cohort turnover, wage growth, labor-market entry, entry wages, initial conditions, age pay gap |
| JEL: | J16 J31 J11 |
| Date: | 2025–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp17621 |