Income taxation of couples and the tax unit choice

We study the optimal income taxation of couples. We determine the resulting intra-family labor supply allocation and its implication for the choice of the tax unit (individual versus joint taxation). We provide a general condition for full joint taxation to arise. We also study how the spouses’ respective labor supply decisions are distorted when the condition does not hold. In particular, we show that, depending on the pattern of mating, the celebrated result according to which the spouse with the more elastic labor supply faces the lower marginal tax rates may or may not hold in our setting.     

Barriers to contraceptive use among Pakistani couples

Despite the existence of a family planning program in Pakistan since 1965 and widespread knowledge among Pakistanis about contraception, there is a high level of unmet need for family planning. One recent survey found that while 53% of married women express the desire to avoid pregnancy, less than 20% use contraception. A recent Population Council study conducted in urban and rural areas of Punjab province investigated personal beliefs, family circumstances, social norms, and gender relations among 1310 married women and 554 of their husbands. The unmet need for contraception was highest among women over age 30 years, those with more living children, less educated women, and women living in rural areas. The study found that while most Pakistanis approve of family planning, obstacles to contraceptive use exist in most marriages. 97% of respondents who wanted another child wished for a boy. That preference for sons influences contraceptive use behavior. The fear of social disapproval of contraceptive use, perceived opposition from in-laws and husbands, and fear of health side effects and divine punishment were major reasons identified against contraceptive use. Female contraceptive users were more autonomous and likely to make domestic decisions without consulting their husbands, while husbands defer to social and cultural norms.     

Impact of having a high-risk pregnancy on future postpartum contraceptive method choice

BackgroundTo compare the knowledge and preference of preconceptional contraception to future postpartum contraceptive method choice in high-risk pregnancies.Research questionDoes a high-risk pregnancy condition affect future postpartum contraceptive method choice?MethodWomen hospitalised at the High Risk Pregnancy unit of a tertiary research and training hospital were asked to complete a self-reported questionnaire that included demographic characteristics, presence of unintended pregnancy, contraceptive method of choice before the current pregnancy, plans for contraceptive use following delivery and requests for any contraceptive counselling in the postpartum period.FindingsA total of 655 pregnant women were recruited. The mean age, gravidity and parity of the women were 27.48 ± 6.25 years, 2.81 ± 2.15 and 1.40 ± 1.77, respectively. High-risk pregnancy indications included 207 (31.6%) maternal, 396 (60.5%) foetal and 52 (7.9%) uterine factors. All postpartum contraceptive choices except for combined oral contraceptives (COCs) usage were significantly different from preconceptional contraceptive preferences (p < 0.001). High-risk pregnancy indications, future child bearing, ideal number of children, income and education levels were the most important factors influencing postpartum contraceptive choices. While the leading contraceptive method in the postpartum period was long-acting reversible contraceptive methods (non-hormonal copper intrauterine device Cu-IUD, the levonorgestrel-releasing intrauterine system (LNG-IUS) (40%), the least preferred method was COCs use (5.2%) and preference of COCs use showed no difference between the preconceptional and postpartum periods (p = 0.202). Overall 73.7% of the women wanted to receive contraceptive counselling before their discharge.ConclusionA high-risk pregnancy condition may change the opinion and preference of contraceptive use, and also seems to affect the awareness of family planning methods.     

A model of the determinants in married women of sterilization method choice

A model for predicting sterilization method selection is constructed on the basis of hypotheses about 1. the relationship between the fertility termination, sterilization, and method selection decisions and 2. the influence of substantive, processual, and contextual factors in those decisions. The model is found to have an acceptably good fit to data from almost five hundred women in married couples selecting either tubal ligation or vasectomy. A number of interesting dynamic pathways leading to method selection are observed. Some weaknesses in the model are discussed. It is desirable that further confirmation and elaboration of the model using longitudinal and husband-wife data be undertaken.This paper is based on a study funded by the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development, Center for Population Research, Grant Number 13459.     

Appropriate methods for analyzing the effect of method choice on contraceptive discontinuation

The contraceptive method chosen is an important determinant of contraceptive discontinuation. However, method choice is endogenous to contraceptive discontinuation. Using data from the 1997 Indonesia Demographic and Health Survey, we apply a multilevel multi-process model to examine the impact of method choice on three types of contraceptive discontinuation. We confirm that method choice is endogenous to the processes of contraceptive abandonment and method switching, but not failure. Ignoring the endogeneity of contraceptive choice leads to various biases in the magnitude of estimated effects of method choice on abandonment and method switching, but the general conclusions are robust to these biases.     

Psychotherapy with gay/lesbian couples and their children in "stepfamilies": a challenge for marriage and family therapists

As increasing numbers of gay/lesbian parents and their children enter into "stepfamily-like" relationships with a gay partner, they are beginning to seek therapy for difficulties peculiar to stepfamily living involving two same-sex partners. This paper focuses on the difficulties experienced by gay parents and children in a step-relationship, and seeks to sensitize mental health professionals to issues specific to intervention with such families. Effective therapy with these families requires that therapists be sensitive to their personal biases and prejudices with regard to gay men and women in general and as parents, and be aware that such attitudes can intrude and negatively affect the therapeutic process and its outcomes. Guidelines for therapy are offered.     

Gay male couples: the importance of coming out and being out to parents

This exploratory study applied grounded theory methodology to examine what coupled gay men thought were the relationship impacts of being out to parents and in-laws. Data were collected from an accidental sample of 40 men in 20 homosexual couples using a standardized, open-ended interview. Virtually all of the respondents who had come out to their parents experienced initial and ongoing parental and in-law disapproval for their lifestyles and relationships. However, most men believed that it benefitted their unions to be out to their parents and partner's parents. Not having to hide the relationship was seen as a primary relationship advantage. Inclusion of one's partner in family events also emerged as a significant benefit. In contrast to the existing literature, a large proportion of respondents believed that parental/in-law antagonism had no adverse impacts on their dyads. They shielded their relationships by maintaining a strong sense of independence and in turn solid intergenerational boundaries. This study provides evidence to suggest that disclosure of sexual orientation to parents may be a distinctive, important developmental task for gay men which is critical to their relationships with their partners. Based on the findings of this research, mental health practitioners would be advised to assist gay men in the establishment and maintenance of strong intergenerational boundaries to protect their unions from parental/in-law disapproval.     

The concept of statistical freedom and its application to social mobility

The actual behaviour of groups of persons yields post factum objective data of the extent to which they availed themselves of the opportunities open to them. It is shown that after having accounted for the influence of selected factors, statistical measures of the realized freedom displayed by the group can be derived from the data, and that these measures may legitimately be interpreted as indices of the freedom of the average person. The problems of social mobility are particularly suited for this novel type of analysis, and the method is demonstrated by application to the choice of occupation of a group of Stockholm-born young men.     

The Greek mirror: the Uranians and their use of Greece

The Uranians comprised a loosely knit group of British and American homosexual poets writing between approximately 1880 and 1930, sharing a number of basic cultural and literary assumptions derived on one hand from Walter Pater, and on the other from Walt Whitman. Although they used Oriental, Christian and other motifs, one of the major elements many shared was a use of various allusions and themes from ancient Greece, including paganism, male companionship or intimate friendship (which was not defined in terms of sameness), and democracy and a natural aristocracy of virtue, which they applied to the concerns of their own society and era. The model of male relationships which they advocated (and in at least some cases practiced) was almost uniformly asymmetrical, either by age or class, or both. In addition to their poetry, various theoretical writings by members of the group are also involved in the discussion, and this article argues that these historical/ literary allusions and themes should not be understood as means of evasion which allowed them to write of tabooed subjects safely, but as part of a consciously adopted artistic/cultural strategy for homosexual emancipation. It also suggests that their arguments should be reexamined as a corrective to the present egalitarian model of homosexuality.     

Adding choice to the contraceptive mix: lessons from Indonesia

Researchers asked 1945 women of reproductive age living in East Java, Indonesia what contraceptive method they preferred during the women's 1st visit to a government family planning clinic. Soon after field workers introduced them to a method, the researchers asked the women what method the field workers suggested and what method the women planned to use. They again spoke to them 1 year later to determine contraception continuation. The field workers granted 86.3% of the women their method choice. Only 9% of these women had stopped using their chosen method while 72% of the women who were not allowed to use their chosen method stopped using the method assigned to them. Thus choice was a key factor in sustained use of contraceptives. Further if family planning workers stick to a mutual participation of both themselves and their clients, they respect clients' method choices and, by informing clients about the chosen method, they strengthen clients' decision making. In the early 1990s, another researcher had developed a system to determine contraceptive needs at various stages of the reproductive period (before 1st marriage, after 1st marriage but prior to 1st birth, after 1st birth but prior to last birth, and after last birth). She applied observed contraceptive preferences for women using contraception within each life cycle stage to the age specific contraception need, derived from data from the 1987 Contraceptive Prevalence Survey for Indonesia, to determine the ideal contraceptive mix. Her calculations demonstrated that oral contraceptive use was high, IUD use was low, particularly among older women, and too few sterilizations had occurred, particularly among older women. Thus Indonesia needed to broaden the contraceptive mix to encourage methods that better meet women's reproductive life cycle needs.     

The labour division of Italian couples after a birth: assessing the effect of unobserved heterogeneity

The results of previous studies on the effect of childbearing on both parents’ paid and unpaid work suffer from the difficulty related to the specification of latent variables that influence the relationship between reproductive behaviour of the couple and working activity. The aim of this study is to estimate the effect of transition to parenthood on the partners’ division of labour by accounting for latent variables, such as the bargaining process between partners and endogenous fertility decisions. In particular, this is the first time that our specific estimation strategy has been applied to determine the impact of childbearing on the division of household labour between partners taking into account the reverse causality effect between labour and fertility decisions. We use longitudinal data on married or cohabiting Italian couples provided by the Italian panel survey of the Generation and Gender Program. Our results are consistent with previous studies, and show that the birth of a child affects a woman’s unpaid labour strongly and positively and her paid labour negatively, while men’s work is mostly unaffected. Moreover, when partners hold traditional attitudes regarding gender roles and the family, the female partner is even more strongly affected by childbearing in terms of total amount of labour (paid plus unpaid). However, our sensitivity analysis shows that these results appear only when our correction strategy for the misspecification of latent variables is applied.

     

A methodology for identifying married couples in medicare data: Mortality, morbidity, and health care use among the married elderly

Wedescribe a method for the development of cohorts of up to three quarters of the 14 million married couples aged 65 and over in the United States. The health care experiences, illness histories, and mortality of these identified couples can be assessed longitudinally using Medicare data. We summarize strengths and limitations of using data from Medicare administrative records for the study of marriage, health, and aging. We illustrate the method by demonstrating substantial differences in survival in a cohort of hospice patients as a function of not only the patient's own diagnosis and illness burden but also the patient's spouse's illness burden.     

The determinants of a mother's choice of family structure

This study attempts to clarify the effect of welfare generosity on family structure while controlling for community mores, local labor market conditions, and other sociodemographic characteristics. In the existing AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) literature, these latter factors have been largely ignored. The empirical analysis is conducted by linking individual-level data from the 1987 National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH) with information on county-level unemployment rates, state AFDC benefits, and proxies of community mores. In particular, the detailed nature of the NSFH data set provides a unique opportunity to investigate the social and economic determinants of cohabitation, among other family structures. Local labor market conditions are found to significantly affect marriage and single-motherhood, while community conservatism is found to discourage the least conventional family structure — cohabitation. Finally, this study raises some question about the effect of AFDC policy on marriage and related events. Specifically, AFDC's statistical impact is found to be sensitive to the inclusion of an explicit measure of community conservatism in the empirical model specification.     

The choice of factor mobility in a dynamic world

This paper compares the steady-state welfare implications of opening a two-country overlapping-generations world to international labor or capital mobility. By capturing the dual nature of labor mobility through the effect of migrants' savings on capital formation, this dynamic setting recovers the asymmetry between capital and labor denied to them in the existing static literature. It is shown that the optimal choice of factor mobility from a national viewpoint depends on the state of the economy with respect to the Golden Rule and on migrants' average savings ratio with respect to that of non-migrants.I would like to thank anonymous referees for useful comments.     

Dynamic microeconomic models of fertility choice: a survey

We review existing approaches to the specification and estimation of dynamic microeconomic models of fertility. Dynamic fertility models explain the evolution of fertility variates over the life-cycle as the solution to a dynamic programming model involving economic choices. Dynamic models may be classified into structural and reduced-form models. Structural models generally require solution of the underlying dynamic programming problem. Reduced-form models, while based on a structural specification, do not. Recent innovations in estimation methodologies make both types practical and realistic alternatives to static models of lifetime fertility. JEL classification: J13, C41, C61 Received August 26, 1994/Accepted October 23, 1996     

Income dynamics in couples and the dissolution of marriage and cohabitation

Several studies have shown that a wife's strong (socio)economic position is associated with an increase in the risk of divorce. Less is known about such effects for cohabiting relationships. Using a unique and large-scale sample of administrative records from The Netherlands, we analyze the link between couples' income dynamics and union dissolution for married and cohabiting unions over a 10-year period. We find negative effects of household income on separation and positive effects of the woman's relative income, in line with earlier studies. The shape of the effect of the woman's relative income, however, depends on the type of union. Movements away from income equality toward a male-dominant pattern tend to increase the dissolution risk for cohabiting couples, whereas they reduce the dissolution risk for married couples. Movements away from income equality toward a female-dominant pattern (reverse specialization) increase the dissolution risks for both marriage and cohabitation. The findings suggest that equality is more protective for cohabitation, whereas specialization is more protective for marriage, although only when it fits a traditional pattern. Finally, we find that the stabilizing effects of income equality are more pronounced early in the marriage and that income equality also reduces the dissolution risk for same-sex couples.     

Utilizing relationship matrices to better understand the diversity of household arrangements among romantic couples: A cross-country example

Changes in families over the past thirty years have created methodological challenges for research on family variation. Some argue that standard survey methods used for collecting data on families have been outpaced by the transformation of families and hence estimates of family variation are maccurate and opportunities for cross-country comparisons of family variation are hampered. This situation is rectifiable through greater use of relationship matrices. This underused data collection method can precisely portray family variation and facilitate cross-country comparisons. To illustrate the method’s usefulness for family research, relationship matrices data on young persons from Australia and the United States are exploited to: depict individuals’ living arrangements; identify patterns in partnering and childbearing; describe demographic diversity across types of couples; and compare family variation across countries.