Child care and public policy: Introduction

Child care and public policy: Introduction     

United States public policy and the elderly

Cross-sectional comparisons show that poverty among the aged in the United States has dropped dramatically over the last two decades. We use longitudinal data to identify economic events associated with unfavorable economic outcomes and to trace the influence of these events on women and men at different ages. We find that while social insurance programs appear to prevent severe financial hardship from the most frequent work-related events, they are far less effective in cushioning the economic impact of widowhood and divorce, especially for women. We suggest a number of policy changes that would provide some measure of social insurance against adverse family-related events.This paper was presented at the ISPE Conference on the Fiscal Implications of an Aging Population, Limburg, The Netherlands, May 30, 1990. The authors shared equally in writing the paper and are listed alphabetically. The paper was completed while R. V. Burkhauser was a fellow at The Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Deborah Laren provided superb research assistance.     

Forecasting, growth management and public policy decision making

This paper's objective is to describe the interplay between forecasting and decision making. It shows how a forecast helped shape public policy and, in turn, how public policy influenced a forecast, within the context of the growth management effort underway in the San Diego region. The forecast identified economic challenges and land use issues facing the region and public policy actions were developed to address them. Normative forecasting best describes the relationship between the forecast and these public policy decisions. This active approach to forecasting involves first deciding what future outcome is desirable and, then, designing policies and actions to achieve these outcomes.     

Civil religion,social indicators,and public policy

What are the effects of civil religion on American society and culture? As a phenomena which presumably serves to integrate the political with the religious sectors of the national culture in the minds of citizens, it would seem that civil religion should have political consequences. Limited work has shown that civil religious beliefs help predict one's preference among presidential candidates. However, there have been no tests of civil religion as an indicator of public policy preferences. This investigation explores such relationships. While civil religion significantly related to stands on various public policies, these relationships are weak except in comparison to many other types of social indicators. Furthermore, civil religion's political impact on public policy orientations would appear less than its impact on the selection of presidential candidates.     

代际投入与农村老年人代际经济支持:代际合作与家庭效用

基于一项具有全国代表性的抽样调查数据,文章通过Logistic多元估计模型与倾向值匹配等量化方法,以代际投入对农村老年人代际经济支持的影响分析为切入点,回应了代际合作与家庭效用关系的经典命题.结果表明:父代经济收入与子代数量,影响着子代投入与农村老年人代际经济支持之间的关系.在三代的代际交换中,给予孙代的投入对农村老年人代际经济支持产生显著性影响,并且存在着稳健性的正向效应.在三代的代际合作中,给予孙代的投入对家庭效用产生了正向显著性影响.文章指出了代际合作与农村老年人家庭效用之间的正向关系,生育偏好成为影响农村老年人家庭效用的重要参数,并说明了代际交换的不平衡以及子代家庭效用增长等问题.     

Public opinion surveys as guides to public policy and spending

Public opinion surveys purport to express the public's opinion. The literature on survey techniques has, however, recognized various potential limitations to the validity of survey results. While improved survey methodology may reduce statistical bias and improve validity, it cannot avoid the implicit weighting of preferences. This normative aspect of surveying has often been unrecognized or disguised as a purely technical matter. Such things as sample selection, choice of survey instrument and the method of aggregating results will each contribute to a pattern of preference weights. Several common survey techniques are examined in this light. It is proposed that no single ‘correct’ method of preference aggragation exists. Increased public recognition of, and debate on this normative aspect of surveying is recommended.     

Black business transformation,black well-being,and public policy

This article examines public policy and social welfare issues related to a recent trend in black business ownership: the decline of black-owned businesses in ‘traditional’ personal services serving a predominantly black clientele, and the corresponding increase of black-owned businesses in ‘emerging’ capital- and knowledge-intensive fields. It is argued that, while the growth of black business ownership in emerging fields is a sign of black economic progress, overall trends in black business ownership are not entirely positive. For one thing, the divergent trends in traditional and emerging black-owned firms reflect widening socioeconomic disparities within black communities. Moreover, the decline of traditional black-owned firms bodes ill for disadvantaged blacks in inner-cities. After reviewing the development of black business enterprise in the United States, trends in black business ownership since the 1970s are examined. Patterns of change in traditional personal services and emerging business services are then linked to social and economic transformations that have enabled many blacks to participate in the larger national economy. The article concludes by discussing the implications of declines in traditional black businesses for black well-being and for public policy.     

The intergenerational transmission of human capital: the role of skills and health

We provide new evidence on some of the mechanisms reflected in the intergenerational transmission of human capital. Applying both an adoption and a twin design to rich data from the Swedish military enlistment, we show that greater parental education increases sons’ cognitive and non-cognitive skills, as well as their health. The estimates are in many cases similar across research designs and suggest that a substantial part of the effect of parental education on their young adult children’s human capital works through improving their skills and health.     

Illegal immigration,deportation policy,and the optimal timing of return

Countries with strict immigration policies often resort to deportation measures to reduce their stocks of illegal immigrants. Many of their undocumented foreign workers, however, are not deported but rather choose to return home voluntarily. This paper studies the optimizing behavior of undocumented immigrants who continuously face the risk of deportation, modeled by a stochastic process, and must decide how long to remain in the host country. It is found that the presence of uncertainty with respect to the length of stay abroad unambiguously reduces the desired migration duration and may trigger a voluntary return when a permanent stay would otherwise be optimal. Voluntary return is motivated by both economic and psychological factors. Calibration of the model to match the evidence on undocumented Thai migrants in Japan suggests that the psychological impact of being abroad as an illegal alien may be equivalent to as large as a 68 % cut in the consumption rate at the point of return.     

The intergenerational transmission of noncognitive skills and their effect on education and employment outcomes

We use information on second-generation migrants to study the existence of a cultural component on the formation process of noncognitive skills and its effect on education and employment outcomes. Our measures of noncognitive skills include: personality traits that children are encouraged to learn at home and inherited civic capital. Individuals whose cultural heritage places a relatively higher value to independence and, in comparison, a relative lower value on child qualities positively associated with the conscientiousness personality factor, i.e. hard work and thrift, report lower education, worse occupational status and lower wages on average. Individuals with a higher inherited civic capital declare a higher educational level, but we find no effect of inherited civic capital on adult labor market outcomes.     

In vitro fertilization and public policy: turning to the consumer

A responsible and comprehensive policy of in vitro fertilization should be preceded by the gathering of empirical information about the application of the procedure in the 138 IVF centers across the country. To date, attention has been directed more to the implications of IVF as a whole than to actual behaviors in the medical community. It is appropriate to survey patients and physicians, examine consent forms, and study guidelines issued by the medical community in order to enhance public knowledge of what has been done voluntarily in the medical community and what remains to be done. Moreover, consumers should be encouraged to speak about their experiences and other groups encouraged to act as advocates for affirmative IVF policy. At present, the interest group spectrum is skewed by physicians' interests groups (speaking for IVF) and other interest groups criticizing the technique. Organized advocates for affirmative IVF policy are less well represented.     

Genetic and environmental influences on cognition during childhood

The basic methodology of behavior genetics is described in the context of the twin and sibling/adoption design. Results of applying this model to cross-sectional data on cognitive development throughout the lifespan are presented. Results from a large longitudinal twin and adoption study of general intelligence are presented to illustrate the use of the basic behavior genetic model in studying the causes of continuity and change in development. A special model is presented for the study of abnormal behavior occurring at the extremes of the distribution and an adaptation of the model is discussed for the study of genetic linkage or the mapping of quantitative trait loci (QTL). Results of applying this model to a sample of twins and kindred siblings indicated the presence of a major QTL for dyslexia on chromosome 6. The purpose of the paper is to illustrate the scope of behavior genetic methodology in studying individual differences in behavior in a biosocial context.     

A structural approach to women's hometime and experience-earnings profiles: Maternity leave and public policy

The differential availability of maternity leave benefits is shown to be an important factor in the earnings attainment process of women. Interaction effects with this job characteristic are found for experience, occupational status, and crowding. The human capital model's explanation of the relationship between women's hometime, women's job choice, and public policy is critically examined. The results indicate that the provision of adequate child care needs to be coupled with parental leave policies if women are to make significant gains in earnings from reducing their time spent at home.The data and tabulations used in this study were made available by the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research. The data were originally collected by Robert P. Quinn and Graham L. Staines. Neither they nor the Consortium bear any responsibility for the analysis or interpretations presented here. This paper was presented at the 1989 American Sociological Association meetings.     

Diversity in experiences of parental structure during childhood and adolescence

The proportion of children living in parental structures other than mother/father has increased in recent decades because of increased separation/divorce and greater prevalence of nonmarital childbearing. This study uses the National Survey of Families and, Households to examine the parental structure experiences of children who had ever lived in nonintact families. The results show considerable variation in experiences among such children. The analysis illustrates the diversity by considering parental structure experiences given I) mother-only family at birth, 2) mother/father family at birth and later parental marital disruption, and 3) parental structure at age 15.     

Community: Toward an integration of research,theory, evaluation,and public policy considerations

This article presents a paradigm for the analysis of communities and investments designed to improve them. Its fundamental objective is to provide the researcher, the theoretician, the evaluator, and the public policymaker with a common analytic framework. Direct and indirect effects of investment programs (e.g., in education, economic development, and health) can be documented longitudinally, and the community analyzed as an independent, dependent or mediating variable. The roots of this approach in social science and policy theory are explored. Five concepts (Status, Change, Interaction, Duality of Interaction and Change, and Viability) are incorporated. Community is operationally defined to include fifteen sectors whose interactions and changes can be studied systematically over time. This approach can help to clarify how a community, its people, culture, and institutions, and the outside world both influence and are influenced by investment programs.     

Intergenerational transmission of age at first birth in the Netherlands for birth cohorts born between 1935 and 1984: evidence from municipal registers

Whereas most research on the intergenerational transmission of fertility behaviour has focused on transmission of the number of children, this paper studies the transmission of the timing of first births. Specific attention is paid to changes in the strength of transmission across cohorts. Theoretically, it is unclear whether the strength of intergenerational transmission of entry into parenthood can be expected to increase or to decrease across cohorts. Event history analyses of data in Dutch registers show a substantial degree of intergenerational transmission in the age at which people have their first child. The degree of transmission from mothers to children increases for successive cohorts. Intergenerational transmission becomes weaker the longer children postpone entry into parenthood. At young ages transmission from mothers to children is stronger than from fathers to children.     

流动人口社会保障问题的公共政策思考

随着社会经济改革开放的深入发展,以农民工为主体的流动人口数量还将持续增加,作为一个特殊的人口群体将长期存在。流动人口突破了城乡二元结构的樊篱,为就业增加了竞争力,为城市增加了活力,为现代化增添了动力,也有力地推动了政府职能转变和管理服务方式转变。然而,绝大部分流动的劳动力没有养老、工伤、医疗、失业等基本的社会保障。流动人口在我国经济发展中扮演了重要角色,但现有的社会保障机制并没有完全覆盖每年近2亿的流动人口。由于一些流动人口缺乏基本的就业、医疗、保险等社会保障,因此可能会引发一些治安问题和不安定因素。所以,建立有效的流动人口保障机制,是"以人为本"精神和社会公正的最好体现,也是实现社会安定团结局面的一个治本之策。本文简要分析了当前我国流动人口社会保障的现状以及建立流动人口社会保障的必要性和紧迫性,并从公共政策的角度提出了若干建议。