Procreative attitudes of newly married couples

Results are presented from a 1985 survey conducted among newly married couples in Poland concerning ideal and planned number of children. Both husbands and wives participated in the survey. Comparisons are made with results from a previous survey undertaken in 1975.     

Time use of married couples: Bayesian approach

ABSTRACT

The living hours data of individuals' time spent on daily activities are compositional and include many zeros because individuals do not pursue all activities every day. Thus, we should exercise caution in using such data for empirical analyses. The Bayesian method offers several advantages in analyzing compositional data. In this study, we analyze the time allocation of Japanese married couples using the Bayesian model. Based on the Bayes factors, we compare models that consider and do not consider the correlations between married couples' time use data. The model that considers the correlation shows superior performance. We show that the Bayesian method can adequately take into account the correlations of wives' and husbands' living hours, facilitating the calculation of partial effects that their activities' variables have on living hours. The partial effects of the model that considers the correlations between the couples' time use are easily calculated from the posterior results.     

Motivation with regard to attitudes toward procreation among married women

The results of a sample survey on attitudes toward reproduction in Poland are presented in this two-part article. The survey, which was conducted by the Central Statistical Office in 1977, covered 9,799 women up to age 45. The women surveyed are divided into three main groups, consisting of those with positive, conditional, and negative attitudes toward having more children. The attitudes and characteristics of the women are analyzed.     

Do divorcing couples become happier by breaking up?

Summary.  Divorce is a leap in the dark. The paper investigates whether people who split up actually become happier. Using the British Household Panel Survey, we can observe an individual's level of psychological well-being in the years before and after divorce. Our results show that divorcing couples reap psychological gains from the dissolution of their marriages. Men and women benefit equally. The paper also studies the effects of bereavement, of having dependant children and of remarriage. We measure well-being by using general health questionnaire and life satisfaction scores.     

Measurement of occupational mobility using semi-markov models

As proposed by Bartholomew (1967), occupational mobility should better be represented by semi-Markov processes. In the present paper attempts have been made to develop some new measures of occupational mobility in terms of serai-Markov processes and their values have been studied in the three extreme situations of interest.     

Coordinate-free analysis of trends in British social mobility

This paper is intended to make a contribution to the ongoing debate about declining social mobility in Great Britain by analyzing mobility tables based on data from the 1991 British Household Panel Survey and the 2005 General Household Survey. The models proposed here generalize Hauser's levels models and allow for a semi-parametric analysis of change in social mobility. The cell frequencies are assumed to be equal to the product of three effects: the effect of the father's position for the given year, the effect of the son's position for the given year, and the mobility effect related to the difference between the father's and the son's positions. A generalization of the iterative proportional fitting procedure is proposed and applied to computing the maximum likelihood estimates of the cell frequencies. The standard errors of the estimated parameters are computed under the product-multinomial sampling assumption. The results indicate opposing trends of mobility between the two timepoints. Fewer steps up or down in the society became less likely, while more steps became somewhat more likely.     

The spatial and socio-occupational mobility of the population

The author describes topics included in a study of spatial, social, and occupational mobility in Poland. These include rural migration, the effect of the family life cycle on migration, the social impact of migration, the effect of migration on spatial distribution, and migration prospects until the end of this century.     

A new mobility index for transition matrices

In this work we construct a mobility index able to grasp the prevailing direction in the evolution of a given set of statistical units. We consider the case of dynamics ruled by a transition matrix, whose states are based on an ordered economic variable (firm size or income, among others) such that the future position of an individual can be better or worse than the current one. The existing indices measure only the absolute value of mobility, without providing information about the main direction in the dynamics. We propose here a whole family of directional indices defined as functions of the transition matrix, so that their absolute value measures the intensity of mobility, and their sign ( $+/-$ + / ? ) represents the prevailing direction towards improvement/worsening in the dynamics under study.     

Estimation under length-bias and right-censoring: an application to unemployment duration analysis for married women

In this work we analyse unemployment duration for married women in Spain, using the Labour Force Survey (LFS) of the Spanish Institute for Statistics, 1987-1997. Consistent non-parametric estimation of the unemployment survival function is provided. Since the available data are length- biased, a suitable correction of the Kaplan-Meier product-limit estimator is motivated and used for the referred analysis. The accuracy of parametric models is checked by means of goodness-of-fit plots--a graphical tool that requires preliminary estimation of the survival. Structural features of the associated hazard (as monotonicity and unimodality) are explored.     

Men matter more: the social class identity of married British women, 1985–1991

Summary.  We investigate the class identity of married women as it relates to their own and their husband's class position. Whereas previous workers have attempted to test whether identity depends solely on the husband's position, not at all on the husband's position or equally on the husband's and wife's position, leaving out all intermediate cases, we estimate new diagonal reference models that quantify the relative weight of each partner's class position on their own class identity. In previous literature, it was also argued that women who work full time should be more likely to adopt a sharing model than other women and in some cases these different types of women were compared. We move beyond this simple dichotomy and more systematically formulate hypotheses about the conditions under which women attach more or less weight to their own class position and less or more weight respectively to that of their husbands. To test these hypotheses, we consider models where the weights are allowed to depend on characteristics of each partner and the couple. Using the British Social Attitudes Survey data for 1985–1991, we find that, when the husband's commitment to the labour force exceeds that of the wife, the husband's weight exceeds the wife's weight but, when the wife's commitment exceeds that of the husband's, the weights are approximately equal. We also find (unexpectedly) that women who hold higher positions than their husbands attach more weight to their husband's position than to their own position.     

Unemployed couples: the labour market effects of making both partners search for work

Summary.  The paper evaluates the effect of a recent change to unemployment benefit in the UK which requires both partners in a couple (rather than just one) to search for work. The difference-in-differences estimator is extended in two ways. First, variations in when the change was implemented are exploited to test and adjust for bias resulting from differential trends among the control group. Second, the approach is combined with matching to relax functional form restrictions. After several months, positive effects on exiting from benefits were detected but effects on entry to jobs were less apparent.     

Changes in the geographical mobility of the population of Poland

Spatial mobility in Poland is analyzed for the period 1976-1989. The focus is on the decline in internal migration over time and its causes. The analysis includes migration between rural and urban areas as well as migration among voivodships. Factors affecting migration include changes in the age distribution; however, the authors conclude that changes in migration patterns are primarily due to socioeconomic factors, particularly the economic crises the country has faced in recent years.     

Estimation and Prediction in the Presence of Spatial Confounding for Spatial Linear Models

In studies that produce data with spatial structure, it is common that covariates of interest vary spatially in addition to the error. Because of this, the error and covariate are often correlated. When this occurs, it is difficult to distinguish the covariate effect from residual spatial variation. In an i.i.d. normal error setting, it is well known that this type of correlation produces biased coefficient estimates, but predictions remain unbiased. In a spatial setting, recent studies have shown that coefficient estimates remain biased, but spatial prediction has not been addressed. The purpose of this paper is to provide a more detailed study of coefficient estimation from spatial models when covariate and error are correlated and then begin a formal study regarding spatial prediction. This is carried out by investigating properties of the generalized least squares estimator and the best linear unbiased predictor when a spatial random effect and a covariate are jointly modelled. Under this setup, we demonstrate that the mean squared prediction error is possibly reduced when covariate and error are correlated.     

空间计量模型中空间矩阵的误用及其影响

 本文通过研究指出,基于常用的空间计量经济学模型嵌套检验方法,我们经常会遇到空间结构关系误用的情况。通过设计一个Monte Carlo实验,本文讨论了空间矩阵误用的概率、影响空间矩阵误用的因素以及空间矩阵误用对空间计量经济学模型估计造成的影响等三个问题。     

基于空间Shift-Share模型测度区域经济空间影响的新方法

梳理Shift-Share模型的演进过程,讨论了不同形式的Shift-Share模型的经济学含义,并将其拓展到区域空间影响测度研究,构建了一个完整的分析框架和测量模型。将该方法应用于长三角地区产业空间影响测度,得到了一些有意义的结论。