The Effect of Imputation Procedures on First Birth Intervals: Evidence from Five African Fertility Surveys

In most African societies there is little motivation to remember dates of demographic events with the level of precision required in demographic surveys. Consequently it is common that the large majority of survey respondents can provide only the calendar year of occurrence or their age at the time of the event. The World Fertility Survey Group decided to handle the problem of poor date reporting by using a computer program to impute the missing information. This article illustrates the effect of these imputation procedures on cross-national differentials in the proportion of premarital first births in Benin, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, and Nigeria. The analysis demonstrates that the exceptionally low proportion of premarital first births in Ghana is an artifact of the imputation procedures.     

The Effect of Childhood Family Size on Fertility in Adulthood: New Evidence From IV Estimation

Although fertility is positively correlated across generations, the causal effect of children’s experience with larger sibships on their own fertility in adulthood is poorly understood. With the sex composition of the two firstborn children as an instrumental variable, we estimate the effect of sibship size on adult fertility using high-quality data from Norwegian administrative registers. Our study sample is all firstborns or second-borns during the 1960s in Norwegian families with at least two children (approximately 110,000 men and 104,000 women). An additional sibling has a positive effect on male fertility, mainly causing them to have three children themselves, but has a negative effect on female fertility at the same margin. Investigation into mediators reveals that mothers of girls shift relatively less time from market to family work when an additional child is born. We speculate that this scarcity in parents’ time makes girls aware of the strains of life in large families, leading them to limit their own number of children in adulthood.     

Fertility assimilation of immigrants: Evidence from count data models

This study applies count data estimation techniques to investigate the fertility adjustment of immigrants in the destination country. Data on completed fertility are taken from the 1996 wave of the German Socioeconomic Panel (GSOEP). While the economic literature stresses the role of prices and incomes as determinants of fertility, the demographic literature discusses whether assimilation or disruption effects dominate immigrants' fertility after migration. We find evidence in favor of the assimilation model according to which immigrant fertility converges to native levels over time. In addition, we confirm the negative impact of female human capital on fertility outcomes. Received: 7 January 1999/Accepted: 10 August 1999     

Fertility,Education, and Development: Evidence from India

Fertility has declined significantly in many parts of India since the early 1980s. This article examines the determinants of fertility levels and fertility decline, using data on Indian districts for 1981 and 1991. The authors find that women's education and child mortality are the most important factors explaining fertility differences across the country and over time. Low levels of son preference also contribute to lower fertility. By contrast, general indicators of modernization and development such as urbanization, poverty reduction, and male literacy exhibit no significant association with fertility. En passant, the authors probe a subject of much confusion— the relation between fertility decline and gender bias.     

The Impact of College Education on Fertility: Evidence for Heterogeneous Effects

As college-going among women has increased, more women are going to college from backgrounds that previously would have precluded their attendance and completion. This affords us the opportunity and motivation to look at the effects of college on fertility across a range of social backgrounds and levels of early achievement. Despite a substantial literature on the effects of education on women’s fertility, researchers have not assessed variation in effects by selection into college. With data on U.S. women from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, we examine effects of timely college attendance and completion on women’s fertility by the propensity to attend and complete college using multilevel Poisson and discrete-time event-history models. Disaggregating the effects of college by propensity score strata, we find that the fertility-decreasing college effect is concentrated among women from comparatively disadvantaged social backgrounds and low levels of early achievement. The effects of college on fertility attenuate as we observe women from backgrounds that are more predictive of college attendance and completion.     

中国生育水平的空间与社会趋同研究——基于“五普”和“六普”微观数据的比较分析

本研究以2010年中国第六次人口普查微观数据为基础,采用35岁妇女平均曾生子女数作为终生生育率的估计指标对当前中国的生育水平进行分析。研究发现,当前中国妇女的终生生育率为1.52,通过教育部9岁学龄儿童人数估算的妇女终生生育率也介于1.5¹.6之间,因此,当前中国已经处于低生育水平国家行列。不同省(自治区、直辖市)、民族、文化教育程度、职业、城乡、农业户籍和非农业户籍、流动人口与户籍人口的生育水平有趋同的发展态势。     

Fertility in Larsmo: The Effect of Laestadianism

Larsmo is a small municipality on the West coast of Finland with an exceptional fertility development due to the presence of a revivalist movement, Laestadianism, which is opposed to contraception. About 40 per cent of the population are Laestadians. Laestadians do not cohabit outside formal marriage, and the rule of pre-marital sexual abstinence seems to be observed. Within marriage, fertility seems to be unrestricted with respect to the first child, but an increasing proportion of Laestadians have begun to practise family planning, lengthen birth intervals, and restrict their families to three or four children. There remains, however, an inner group which appears to procreate without restriction. Since mortality is very low, a total fertility of six births per woman corresponds to a net reproduction of about 2.9, which is among the highest documented after 1970.Fertility in Larsmo has traditionally been high, and we expected that the presence of pro-natalist Laestadians would tend to increase the fertility of non-Laestadians as well. However, the demographic behaviour of non-Laestadians in most respects resembles that of the Finnish population as a whole, although extra-marital cohabitation seems to be rarer, since almost all the children born are legitimate.     

The Effect of State Transfers on Poverty in Post-Socialist Eastern Europe

During the market transition in Eastern Europe, social support mechanisms shifted from employment-based measures to means-tested ones. This restructuring, along with an overall decrease in social support and economic productivity and an increase in unemployment, meant that these payments were often inadequate to address the large rise in poverty during this period of time. Little research, however, considers whether individual-level payments were effective in reducing poverty. This paper considers the efficacy of these individual-level payments in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania, using two-wave panel data. It shows that state transfers to individuals reduced their poverty in all these countries. Thus, while the level of payments may have been inadequate to eliminate the adverse effects of the market transition, the payments themselves were beneficial to individuals and reduced their poverty.     

The Role of Contraceptive Supply and Demand in Mexican Fertility Decline: Evidence from a Microdemographic Study

This paper uses retrospective life history data to assess the impact of family planning services on contraceptive use in a rural Mexican township. Between 1960 and 1990 contraceptive use rose and fertility declined dramatically. Both contraceptive supply and demand factors were influential in these trends. The start of the government-sponsored family planning programme in the late 1970s was associated with a sharp rise in female sterilization and use of the IUD. However, once we controlled for the changing socio-economic and demographic characteristics of the sample, the presence of family planning services had no significant effect on the likelihood that women used modern reversible methods compared to traditional methods. Men and women expressed concerns about the safety of modern methods such as the pill and the IUD. Efforts to increase modern contraceptive use should place greater emphasis on communicating the safety of these methods and improving the quality of services.     

The Effect of Fertility Reduction on Economic Growth

We assess quantitatively the effect of exogenous reductions in fertility on output per capita. Our simulation model allows for effects that run through schooling, the size and age structure of the population, capital accumulation, parental time input into childrearing, and crowding of fixed natural resources. The model is parameterized using a combination of microeconomic estimates and standard components of quantitative macroeconomic theory. We apply the model to examine the effect of a change in fertility from the UN medium‐variant to the UN low‐variant projection in Nigeria. For a base case set of parameters, we find that such a change would raise output per capita by 5.6 percent at a horizon of 20 years and by 11.9 percent at a horizon of 50 years. We conclude with a discussion of the quantitative significance of these results.     

行业垄断与职工工资收入研究——基于中国上市公司数据的分析

文章使用2002～2009年中国上市公司的数据,实证检验了行业垄断对上市公司职工工资收入的影响。研究发现,垄断行业的职工工资收入要显著高于非垄断行业,并且垄断和非垄断行业职工工资收入差距有持续扩大的趋势。同时,垄断行业职工工资并未带来企业业绩的提升,说明垄断行业高收入可能是不合理的。研究还发现,垄断行业的高管与职工工资收入差距显著更小,表明垄断企业更倾向于在内部平均分配收入。     

The Effect of Household Wealth on Educational Attainment: Evidence from 35 Countries

The authors use household survey data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) from 44 surveys (in 35 countries) to document different patterns in the enrollment and attainment of children from rich and poor households. They overcome the lack of income or expenditure data in the DHS by constructing a proxy for long-run wealth of the household from the asset information in the surveys, using the statistical technique of principal components. There are three major findings. First, the enrollment profiles of the poor differ across countries but fall into distinctive regional patterns: in some regions the poor reach nearly universal enrollment in first grade, but then drop out in large numbers leading to low attainment (typical of South America), while in other regions the poor never enroll in school (typical of South Asia and Western/Central Africa). Second, there are enormous differences across countries in the “wealth gap,” the difference in enrollment and educational attainment of the rich and poor. While in some countries the difference in the median years of school completed of the rich and poor is only a year or two, in other countries the wealth gap in attainment is 9 or 10 years. Third, the attainment profiles can be used as diagnostic tools to suggest issues in the educational system, such as the extent to which low attainment is attributable to physical unavailability of schools.     

An Evolutionary Interpretation of Fertility Decline: New Evidence

This article presents new evidence that partly reinforces and partly qualifies the results of a recent article on fertility decline published in this journal by Sanderson and Dubrow. Eight panel regression analyses were carried out, four for the period between 1960 and 1990 and four more for the period of the original demographic transition, that between 1880 and 1940. The analyses for the 1960–1990 period show that Sanderson and Dubrow's original conclusion that infant mortality decline was causing fertility decline (rather than the reverse) was correct. On the other hand, Sanderson and Dubrow's conclusion that enhanced female empowerment led to fertility decline proved incorrect. The new analyses reported here show that the reverse was in fact the case: women became more empowered as a result of declining fertility. The panel analyses carried out for the 1880–1940 period showed that infant mortality decline seemed to be an important cause of fertility decline between 1880 and 1910 but not between 1910 and 1940. However, the reverse hypothesis—that fertility decline caused infant mortality decline during this period—was falsified. I conclude that the causes of fertility decline in the modern world may be different, at least to some extent, from those in the original demographic transition. This is an unsatisfying (because unparsimonious) result that suggests the need for more research.     

The Effect of Anti-Abortion Legislation on Nineteenth Century Fertility

Using nineteenth century legal information combined with census information, I examine the effect of state laws that restricted American women’s access to abortion on the ratio of children to women. I estimate an increase in the birthrate of 4 % to 12 % when abortion is restricted. In the absence of anti-abortion laws, fertility would have been 5 % to 12 % lower in the early twentieth century.     

Responding to the Psychological Context of Extreme Poverty: Using Cash Transfers to Stimulate Productive Investment Decisions in Bangladesh

The extreme poor in Bangladesh suffer from a particularly severe form of multidimensional poverty. Despite opportunities for investment made available by approaches such as microfinance, which could ensure future subsistence and graduation from poverty, the extreme poor continue to under-invest in long-term income-generating activities. This continued prioritisation of immediate needs perpetuates poverty, and often leads to its intergenerational transfer. While the evolving debate on multidimensional poverty has helped to unpack the structural causes behind this investment behaviour, very little literature has sought to understand the decision process itself. In this paper, we argue that investment decisions by the extreme poor are shaped by the psychological context of life in extreme poverty. We propose a psychological model of how extreme poverty—which is multidimensional as well as commonly chronic—affects the decision-making context of the individual, causing the future to be heavily discounted and inhibiting investment. The psychological impact of extreme poverty could be seen as an overarching and under-emphasised dimension of poverty itself due to its role in undermining the capability to invest, and impeding the long-term security of a household. We argue for a holistic approach to extreme poverty and wellbeing, involving a greater understanding that people’s own perceptions of agency and needs impact upon decision making for the present and the future, in this case specifically towards livelihood choices likely to stimulate productive gains. Using a case study of one demand-driven conditional cash transfer project in Bangladesh, we propose that the psychological context of extreme poverty must be addressed in order to stimulate investment. An analysis of the project’s success suggests that it was able to effectively promote investment by altering the context within which investment decisions were made. The paper concludes that effective poverty reduction programming must more directly address the psychological context of poverty and decision-making, and recommends that innovative choice architecture could provide one method of doing so.     

Demand or Ideation? Evidence from the Iranian Marital Fertility Decline

Is the onset of fertility decline caused by structural socioeconomic changes or by the transmission of new ideas? The decline of marital fertility in Iran provides a quasi-experimental setting for addressing this question. Massive economic growth started in 1955; measurable ideational changes took place in 1967. We argue that the decline is described more precisely by demand theory than by ideation theory. It began around 1959, just after the onset of massive economic growth but well before the ideational changes. It paralleled the rapid growth of participation in primary education, and we found no evidence that the 1967 events had any effect on the decline. More than one-quarter of the decline can be attributed to the reduction in child mortality, a key mechanism of demand theory. Several other findings support this main conclusion.     

The Effects of Intrauterine Malnutrition on Birth and Fertility Outcomes: Evidence From the 1974 Bangladesh Famine

This article uses the Bangladesh famine of 1974 as a natural experiment to estimate the impact of intrauterine malnutrition on sex of the child and infant mortality. In addition, we estimate the impact of malnutrition on post-famine pregnancy outcomes. Using the 1996 Matlab Health and Socioeconomic Survey (MHSS), we find that women who were pregnant during the famine were less likely to have male children. Moreover, children who were in utero during the most severe period of the Bangladesh famine were 32 % more likely to die within one month of birth compared with their siblings who were not in utero during the famine. Finally, we estimate the impacts of the famine on subsequent pregnancy outcomes. Controlling for pre-famine fertility, we find that women who were pregnant during the famine experienced a higher number of stillbirths in the post-famine years. This increase appears to be driven by an excess number of male stillbirths.