凹型收益率曲线与中等教育投资"瓶颈":对童工的另一种解释

对于童工问题,以往的研究大多以童工本人或其家庭、学校和市场环境作为分析对象,强调贫困对儿童教育的伤害,忽视了教育本身对于受教育者的经济意义,尤其是教育作为一种人力资本投资在经济上的合理性.本文的分析表明,对落后地区的家庭而言,由于中等教育阶段的成本增加而收益下降,使得其收益率较低,缺乏投资上的吸引力,进而导致失学和童工问题.鉴于问题的复杂性,必须将各种法规和措施结合在一起,综合治理,降低贫困家庭中等教育的成本,才有可能突破这一"瓶颈",最终减少和消除童工.     

Child Mobility,Maternal Status,and Household Composition in Rural South Africa

This article examines the influence of maternal status, socioeconomic status of the household, and household composition on the mobility of children aged 0–14 in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa, from 1999 to 2008. Using data from the Agincourt Health and Demographic Surveillance System, we found that children whose mothers were temporary migrants, living elsewhere, or dead had higher odds of moving than children whose mothers were coresident. Older children and children living in richer households faced lower odds of mobility. For children whose mothers were coresident, there was no effect of maternal substitutes on child mobility. However, among children whose mothers were temporary migrants or living elsewhere, the presence of prime-aged and elderly females lowered the odds of mobility. For maternal orphans, the presence of elderly women in the household lowered their odds of mobility. The results underscore the importance of examining the conditions under which children move in order to strengthen service delivery targeted at safeguarding children’s well-being.     

Adverse Effects of Next Birth,Gender, and Family Composition on Child Survival in Rural Bangladesh

This paper reports on part of a study of “Reproductive facts, norms and attitudes among the various socio-economic groups of the white population in Johannesburg”, and deals with the incidence of fecundity and various degrees of sterility among a representative sample of white married couples under 50 years of age. The nature and incidence of fecundity is correlated with certain demographic and social variables such as age and duration of marriage, the use of contraception, fcetal deaths and childlessness, birth parity, income, occupation, home language, religion and occupational status.     

Child care and public policy: Introduction

Child care and public policy: Introduction     

中国的独生子女与独生子女户

近几十年来 ,中国的“独生子女”与“独生子女户”成为与计划生育政策有关的一代特殊人口与一类特别家庭。对二者界定的不同标准造成了对其规模估计的分歧和深入研究的困难。根据 2 0 0 0年第五次人口普查数据 ,估算出我国现有独生子女数量约为 90 0 0万 ,其中城市独生子女的数量远远高于农村。独生子女之间彼此婚配 ,有可能会形成广受关注的“四二一”家庭。研究显示 ,大城市中独生子女间的婚配概率似乎更高一些 ,但对于全国并不具有普遍意义。由于严格意义的“四二一”家庭的出现取决于多种因素 ,其大规模出现的可能性并不大。对“独生子女”以及“独生子女户”的关注 ,主要来源于对“独生子女”养老能力的质疑和对“独生子女户”养老需求获取满足的前景的担忧。国家目前正在通过“农村部分计划生育家庭奖励扶助制度”等措施帮助“独生子女户”逐步消除后顾之忧     

中国孩子质量与数量的替代关系现状分析——基于分位数回归方法

文章利用中国健康与营养调查2009年度的相关数据,采用分位数回归方法对我国孩子质量与数量间的替代关系进行分析研究,证实在生育政策与社会经济发展双重效力下的我国家庭孩子数量的减少,同时使孩子的质量得以提高。此外,孩子的性别、父母的学历、家庭所处地理位置、家庭长期福利水平以及家中孩子的性别组成也对孩子的质量有显著影响。     

Editorial: Crossed Up at the Border

Population and Environment -     

Beyond Absenteeism: Father Incarceration and Child Development

High rates of incarceration among American men, coupled with high rates of fatherhood among men in prison, have motivated recent research on the effects of parental imprisonment on children’s development. We use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to examine the relationship between paternal incarceration and developmental outcomes for approximately 3,000 urban children. We estimate cross-sectional and longitudinal regression models that control not only for fathers’ basic demographic characteristics and a rich set of potential confounders, but also for several measures of pre-incarceration child development and family fixed effects. We find significant increases in aggressive behaviors and some evidence of increased attention problems among children whose fathers are incarcerated. The estimated effects of paternal incarceration are stronger than those of other forms of father absence, suggesting that children with incarcerated fathers may require specialized support from caretakers, teachers, and social service providers. The estimated effects are stronger for children who lived with their fathers prior to incarceration but are also significant for children of nonresident fathers, suggesting that incarceration places children at risk through family hardships including and beyond parent-child separation.     

Child survivorship estimation: methods and data analysis

"The past 20 years have seen extensive elaboration, refinement, and application of the original Brass method for estimating infant and child mortality from child survivorship data. This experience has confirmed the overall usefulness of the methods beyond question, but it has also shown that...estimates must be analyzed in relation to other relevant information before useful conclusions about the level and trend of mortality can be drawn.... This article aims to illustrate the importance of data analysis through a series of examples, including data for the Eastern Malaysian state of Sarawak, Mexico, Thailand, and Indonesia. Specific maneuvers include plotting completed parity distributions and 'time-plotting' mean numbers of children ever born from successive censuses. A substantive conclusion of general interest is that data for older women are not so widely defective as generally supposed."     

Cohort size and age-specific suicide rates: A contingent relationship

Trends in age-specific suicide rates relate to debates about the consequences of population aging and changes in cohort size for social well-being. Easterlin argues that large cohort size increases suicide rates by reducing relative income; Preston claims that suicide rates fall in large cohorts with high levels of political and social power. To integrate these competing arguments, this paper uses aggregate data on 18 high-income nations from 1953 to 1986 to demonstrate that the direction and strength of the relationship between cohort size and suicide depend on (1) age of the cohort, (2) gender, (3) national context, and (4) time period. The results show that large cohort size raises suicide for the young and middle-aged, but reduces it for the elderly. Also, the effects of cohort size prove stronger for men than for women, for nations with less collectivist institutions than for nations with more collectivist institutions, and for the 1950s and 1960s than for the 1970s and 1980s.     

Cohort size and schooling choice

We develop a perfect-foresight overlapping generations model to investigate the effects of cohort size on schooling decisions and cohort-specific welfare measures. A set of sufficient conditions are presented which ensure the existence of an unique sequence of human capital rental rates and schooling choices for any sequence of cohort sizes. We calibrate the partial equilibrium model using data on schooling investments and aggregate wages over the period 1920 through 1980, and use the parameters to assess the magnitude of lifetime cohort wealth and schooling elasticities computed with respect to the entire cohort size sequence. We find that the equilibrium response of schooling to perturbations in the cohort size sequence is small, so that the adverse effects of increases in the size of own and neighboring cohorts on cohort wealth are not significantly migrated by adjustments in schooling investments within our modelling framework.This research was partially supported by National Institute of Child Health and Human Development grant R01-HD28409 and by the C. V. Starr Center for Applied Economics at New York University. Comments and suggestions by three anonymous referees have resulted in a substantially improved paper. Francis Gupta provided extremely able research assistance. All remaining errors and omissions are attributable to me.     

Potential support ratios: Cohort versus period perspectives

The ‘prospective potential support ratio’ has been proposed by researchers as a measure that accurately quantifies the burden of ageing, by identifying the fraction of a population that has passed a certain measure of longevity, for example, 17?years of life expectancy. Nevertheless, the prospective potential support ratio usually focuses on the current mortality schedule, or period life expectancy. Instead, in this paper we look at the actual mortality experienced by cohorts in a population, using cohort life tables. We analyse differences between the two perspectives using mortality models, historical data, and forecasted data. Cohort life expectancy takes future mortality improvements into account, unlike period life expectancy, leading to a higher prospective potential support ratio. Our results indicate that using cohort instead of period life expectancy returns around 0.5 extra younger people per older person among the analysed countries. We discuss the policy implications implied by our cohort measures.     

Child mortality and fertility: public vs private education

How does the effect of child mortality reductions on fertility and education vary across educational systems? To answer this question, we develop an overlapping-generations model where altruistic parents care about both the number and human capital of their surviving children. We find that, under a private education system, if income is low initially, the economy converges to a Malthusian stagnation steady state. For a high level of initial income, the economy reaches a growth path in which children’s education rises and fertility decreases with income. In the growth regime under private education, exogenous shocks that lower child mortality are detrimental for growth: fertility increases and education declines. In contrast, under a public education system, the stagnation steady state does not exist, and health improvement shocks are no longer detrimental for growth. We therefore offer a new rationale for the introduction of public education.     

Child support and father-child contact: Testing reciprocal pathways

I use three waves of panel data to examine the relationship between child support payments and fathers' contact with their nonmarital children. I disaggregate support into fathers' formal and informal payments and incorporate cross-lagged effects models to identify the direction of causality between payments and contact. After including the behavior from the prior wave (lagged term) and a rich set of family characteristics, I find a marginally significant effect of paying formally at Time 1 on the likelihood of contact at Time 2 but no effect of contact at Time 1 on formal payments at Time 2. In the first examination of the relationship between informal support and father-child contact, I find a strong, positive reciprocal relationship between the likelihood and frequency of father-child contact and the likelihood and amount of informal support, with slightly stronger and more consistent effects of contact on payments than of payments on contact.     

Child support and welfare dynamics: Evidence from Wisconsin

This paper provides estimates of the effect of child support on exiting and reentering welfare for a sample of divorced women in Wisconsin. Modest amounts of child support do not have large effects on exiting welfare in this sample. The percentage of women who return to welfare is higher than has been reported previously. Receiving child support significantly decreases the likelihood of returning to welfare.     

Cohort nuptiality in England and Wales

Summary A computerized nuptiality system, called GENMAR, has been developed to investigate trends in cohort nuptiality in England and Wales. This system has five main programmes dealing with first marriage, the effects of changes in mortality on nuptiality measures, divorce, re-marriage, and marital status distribution. This paper summarizes the results of the application of the first programme to England and Wales data on first marriages of persons who were born in every single year since 1900. GENMAR-1 generated for each of these cohorts a 'complete' gross nuptiality table. The analysis shows that there have been substantial increases in the intensity of first marriage at young ages, a downward shift in the modal age at marriage, and a significant rise in the proportion ever married among women. The cohort nuptiality tables also show that the change in the nuptiality of women was due to changes in both the tempo and level of nuptiality, whereas the change for men was mainly the effect of shifts in the temporal pattern of nuptiality. There are, however, signs of a slow down of marriage among the cohorts born since the early 1950's.     

Editorial: South of the Border Seen Close Up

Population and Environment -     

Growing Diversity among America's Children and Youth: Spatial and Temporal Dimensions

This study documents the changing racial and ethnic mix of America's children. Specifically, we focus on the unusually rapid shifts in the composition and changing spatial distribution of America's young people between 2000 and 2008. Minorities grew to 43 percent of all children and youth, up from 38.5 percent only eight years earlier. In 1990, this figure stood at 33 percent. Among 0–4‐year‐olds, 47 percent of all children were minority in 2008. Changes in racial and ethnic composition are driven by two powerful demographic forces. The first is the rapid increase since 2000 in the number of minority children—with Hispanics accounting for 80 percent of the growth. The second is the absolute decline in the number of non‐Hispanic white children and youth. The growth of minority children and racial diversity is distributed unevenly over geographical space. Over 500 (or roughly 1 in 6) counties now have majority‐minority youth populations. Broad geographic areas of America nevertheless remain mono‐racial, where only small shares of minorities live.