Forecasting enrollments during court-ordered desegregation

Distinctive issues arise when a demographer must forecast enrollments in a context of court-ordered desegregation. The key issue studied here is whether magnet schools have strengthened a district's overall attractiveness to enrollees from outside or merely siphoned students away from other nonmagnet schools within the district, without any real districtwide enrollment gain. To clarify this issue, I analyze patterns of change in grade progression rates over several years as magnet schools were phased in at a large urban school district. Generally, magnet schools induced little actual gain, merely slowing the overall weakening of districtwide retention. These findings furnished an important reality check on the judgment for crafting appropriate forecasting assumptions and the resulting forecast proved reasonably accurate.     

City Effect and Urban Overload as Program Indicators of the Regional Policy

The paper explores the constraints of an optimal regional policy, and itidentifies them through program indicators of city effect and overload.Based on a `programming approach to the regional analysis, and on the``optimal centrality' concept as meeting point of the city-effect andcity-overload curves, the paper outlines a core list of indicators ofcity-effect and overload, quantifying their dimensions (as findings ofresearch conducted for the European Commission, from 20 cities in 4countries of the EU: France, Germany, Italy and United Kingdom).Further, a ``strategy' for an appropriate urban-regionalreorganization, and for an appropriate `ambit of measuring urban lifequality, is outlined. And finally the misleading risks of comparisons inthe wrong spatial `ambit of data collecting about quality of life, arediscussed.     

The impact of cash-benefit reform on parents’ labour force participation

This paper evaluates the impact of a recent Norwegian family-policy reform. The reform provides benefits of up to NOK 3,000 (approximately € 400) per month to families with one- to three-year-old children, who do not utilize state-subsidized day-care centres. We investigate the reforms effect on parents labour force participation. We find that, on average, the reform reduced womens labour force participation and increased the specialization of work between couples. We find that the effect of the reform depends on womens schooling. Specifically, the labour force participation of highly educated mothers fell by more than that of mothers with less education.I am grateful to Associate Professor Espen Bratberg and Professor Alf Erling for their valuable comments. My special thanks to Kjell Vaage, Arild Aakvik and Afsane Bjorvatn for helpful suggestions. This paper was presented in a seminar at the Department of Economics, University of Bergen, Norway. I am thankful to the participants of the seminar for their positive feedback. The paper has also benefited from the reports given by three anonymous referees. I am also thankful to Professor Heather Joshi for helpful remarks on the paper. Responsible editor: Christoph M. Schmidt.     

Fertility Policy and Employment: Implications from the Former Soviet Union

Using individual-level survey data that were collected in Russia in 1993, we analyze the fertility-employment relationship for a sample of urban women who bore children during the Soviet era. Although some Russian policy makers advocate policies that reduce female employment to stimulate fertility, we find little empirical support to ensure success of these policies. Specifically, we find no connection between employment and fertility for our sample of Russian females, perhaps because of their historic, mandated commitment to the labor market. Instead, we find that demographics and attitudes influence fertility decision making. These results, in combination with the findings that our sample of Russian women hold more traditional attitudes toward family and egalitarian attitudes toward work than similar American women, suggest that policies to stimulate fertility by reducing employment may not be effective for women raised during the Soviet era unless a dramatic shift in attitudes away from a strong work commitment also occurs.     

Geographic compactness vs. race/ethnic compactness and other criteria in the delineation of legislative districts

Several criteria have evolved in law and tradition to constrain the delineation of Congressional and State and local legislative districts, such as population equality, geographic compactness, race/ethnic compactness, and integrity of political boundaries. Among the various criteria, I focus on compactness, and in particular, the legal and mensural aspects. Following the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, racial compactness has been employed more and more frequently as a primary criterion, and with reduced restraint compared with other criteria, except perhaps for population equality. In Thornburg v. Gingles (1986), the Supreme Court recognized racial/ethnic compactness and polarization in voting practices as prerequisites for newly established majority-minority districts. In Shaw v. Reno (1993), the Court reaffirmed the principle of geographic compactness as against racial compactness by noting that the shape of Cong. Dist. 12 of North Carolina was bizarre and that it was drawn solely on racial grounds. With this decision, race/ethnic compactness and, by extension, the broad interpretation of the Voting Rights Act have been put in conflict with geographic compactness as criteria. More recently, in Miller v. Johnson (1995), use of race as a predominant factor in district delineation, apart from compactness, was rejected. These developments should renew interest in and support for formal statistical guidelines in evaluating geographic compactness in redistricting plans. Many formulas for measuring compactness have been proposed and tested. Here the commonly used perimeter/circle measure and the circumscribed area/circle measure are compared by an examination of some simple geometric figures and 1990-Census-based C.D.'s. Some problems with these measures are noted, and a new measure, the CV/radii measure (the complement of the coefficient of variation of the radii of the district), is proposed and illustratively applied.     

Choosing children over career? Changes in the postpartum labor force behavior of professional women

In recent years, the popular press in the U.S. hasrepeatedly profiled professionalwomen who have elected to leave the labor force inorder to devote their full-timeenergies to child rearing. The conclusion of thesearticles is often that mothers havetired of trying to be superwomen and have decidedthat high achievement in thelabor force is not compatible with a successful homelife. The purpose of this paperis to explore whether this impression is, in fact,based in truth. Using a sample ofprofessional women drawn from the PSID during theyears 1968–1992, we estimatethe probability of withdrawing from the labor forceat one, two and five year intervalsafter the birth of a child. We use several differentmeasures of labor force withdrawaland find that women who gave birth in recent years aremore likely to report zero hoursof work two years after the birth of a child when comparedto women who gave birthearlier in the sample period. Thus, we find some supportfor the conjecture that moreprofessional women are opting to stay home and raisechildren in lieu of aggressivelypursuing their careers. We do not find any differencesby cohort, indicating that thisphenomenon cuts across women of all childbearingages. However, our results are notrobust across different measures of labor forcewithdrawal, nor are they consistent acrosspostpartum time intervals.     

Interpreting demographic effects in duration analyses of first birth intervals

Estimated demographic effects in proportional hazard models of first birth intervals could reflect time-invariant differences in the risk of a birth, or differences in the timing of a shift in the risk, or both. This paper attempts to distinguish between these possibilities. The procedure is to estimate a more general model than the proportional hazard specification, in which the evolution of the risk of a birth can differ with demographic characteristics. The proportional hazard specification is nested within this more general model. Consequently, the consistency of the data with the risk or the timing interpretation of demographic effects can be tested. The data studied do not lead to a rejection of the proportional hazard specification.Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania. The initial stage of this research was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship. I have benefited from insightful comments from David Bloom, Andrew Foster, Zvi Griliches, V. Joseph Hotz, Duncan Thomas, anonymous referees, and participants in seminars at Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania, and in the Economic Demography sessions of the 1988 Population Association of America annual meetings. Any remaining errors are my own.     

The role of fertility and population in economic growth: empirical research from aggregate cross-national data

Two recently improved sets of cross-country panel data are combined in order to re-examine the effects of population growth and fertility on economic growth. Using a 107 country panel data set covering 1960-85, we find that high birth rates appear to reduce economic growth through investment effects and possibly through capital dilution, although classic resource dilution is not evident in the data. Most significantly, however, birth rate declines have a strong medium-term positive impact on per capita income growth through labour supply or dependency effects.We are very grateful to Allen Kelley for his careful and thoughtful comments on an earlier version of this paper (Brander and Dowrick 1991) which led to a complete re-estimation of our models using updated primary data and reconstructed secondary data sets. We are also grateful to three anonymous referees for very helpful comments. This research was begun while Brander was a Visiting Fellow at the Department of Economics, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. Revisions were carried out while Dowrick was visiting the Department of Economics, University of Warwick. Research assistance was provided by Tracy Tiong. Financial support from the Social Sciences Research Council of Canada and UBC Centre for International Business Studies is gratefully acknowledged.     

Maternity leave and the employment of new mothers in the United States

We use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to examine the relationships between maternity leave coverage and U.S. womens post-birth leave taking and employment decisions from 1988 to 1996. We find that women who were employed before birth are working much more quickly post-birth than women who were not. We also find that, among mothers who were employed pre-birth, those in jobs that provided leave coverage are more likely to take a leave of up to 12 weeks, but return more quickly after 12 weeks. Our results suggest that maternity leave coverage is related to leave taking, as well as the length of time that a new mother stays home after a birth.All correspondence to: Jane Waldfogel. Funding for this project was provided by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the William T. Grant Foundation. We are grateful to the editor and two anonymous referees for helpful comments. Responsible editor: Daniel S. Hamermesh.     

The effect of welfare eligibility on the labor force participation of women of Mexican origin in California

The relationship between AFDC, Food Stamp, and Medi-Cal Program eligibility, on the one hand, and labor force participation, on the other, was analyzed by comparing the labor force participation rates of women of Mexican origin who were fully eligible for these programs with those of less eligible women. Marital status, husband's income, and legal residence in the United States were used to define levels of program eligibility for this sample. The effects of education, English fluency, age, the number and ages of children, and the number of other adults in the household (excluding the mother and spouse) were controlled in logistic regression procedures. The results of the multivariate analyses show that AFDC, food stamps, and Medi-Cal combined inhibit the labor force participation of unmarried mothers. There is no evidence, however, that food stamps and Medi-Cal influence the labor force participation of married mothers. Earnings information on this sample of California women indicate that welfare benefits for unmarried mothers are highly competitive with net earnings, primarily because of the cost childcare. The data imply that free or subsidized childcare would increase labor force participation and reduce AFDC enrollment.     

Family building: A social psychological study of fertility decisions

Decision theory, coupled with a hierarchically arranged questionnaire format, is discussed as a possible approach to the prediction of birth planning decisions. The empirical success of the scheme is examined in terms of interrelating attitudes, behavioral intention, desired family size, and birth planning behavior.This project was supported by Research Grant HD-07225-01A1 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Center for Population Research, by NICHD Center Grant HD-09397-01 to the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology, University of Washington, and by the University of Washington Graduate School Research Projects Fund, from the Public Health Service Biomedical Research Support Grants, Grant #RR07096. The authors thank Dr. Barbara H. Beach for her help with the data analyses. Requests for reprints should be sent to Brenda D. Townes, Ph.D., Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195.     

Purchased child care,optimal family size and mother's employment Theory and econometric analysis

The paper develops a model of family size decisions in which couples choose explicitly a combination of mother's time and purchased childcare (e.g. childminders, nannies) for the care and rearing of children. The theoretical model implies that the impact of the mother's wage on her completed fertility varies with the market price of childcare, and that this effect increases (becoming less negative or more positive) with the level of her wage. Econometric analysis of British micro-data confirms the main predictions of the model.I am grateful to Robert E. Wright for research assistance, and to the Economic and Social Research Council for supporting this research as part of the research programme Income Inequality, Gender and Demographic Differentials. Financial support from the Nuffield Foundation grant no. PT/9, Family Formation and Employment Activity is also gratefully acknowledged.     

Labour supply effects of a cash-for-care subsidy

From 1999, all parents in Norway with children aged one to three, who did not attend publicly subsidised daycare, became eligible for a cash-for-care (CFC) subsidy. One effect of the CFC-subsidy was to increase in the relative price of external child care. This article analyses whether the CFC-subsidy has led to a reduction in the labour supply of mothers. A framework for evaluating policy reforms when reforms are equally and nation-wide accessible is put forward. The results show that the CFC-subsidy has reduced womens labour supply. The results are sustained after controlling for contemporaneous macroeconomic shocks, using a triple difference approach.The author thanks Hege Torp, Erling Barth and Harald Dale-Olsen at The Institute for Social Research, as well as participants at the European Society for Population Economics (ESPE) conference in Bilbao in June 2002, participants at the Lunch-seminar at Statistics Norway, and two anonymous referees for valuable comments. The work is financed by the Norwegian Research Council, grant #137230/530. The financial support is gratefully acknowledged.Responsible editor: Deborah Cobb-Clark.     

Welfare,work, and changes in mothers’ living arrangements in low-income families

Data from a two-wave survey of low-income families in Boston, Chicago, and San Antonio are used to replicate recent reports of a modest increase in the number of low-income children living in two-adult families and to analyze the increase. We find that most of the increase occurred through the addition of a man other than the biological father to the household and that more of it occurred through cohabitation than through marriage. Moreover, across the two waves, cohabiting and marital unions were highly unstable. We review research on stepfamilies and on instability in childrens living arrangements, and we conclude that the kinds of two-adult families being formed in these low-income central-city neighborhoods may not benefit children as much as policy-makers hope. In addition, we investigate the associations between marital and cohabiting transitions, on the one hand, and transitions into and out of Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) receipt, employment, and Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) usage between the two waves on the other. We find that marital transitions are related to TANF and employment transitions but that cohabiting transitions are not. We suggest that low-income mothers may view marriage as more of an economic partnership than cohabitation and may expect more of an economic contribution from a husband than from a cohabiting partner.     

Subsidy policies with capital accumulation: Maintaining employment levels

We study a dual economy model of growth and unemployment in the presence of Harris-Todaro type labor migration. The model is a discrete time model of economic growth with given population but endogenous migration of labor. The economy tries to reach development in the quickest possible time while not allowing unemployment to rise above a socially acceptable level. We characterize situations under which maximizing the accumulation of capital in each period is optimal. We also study how particular taxes and subsidies affect unemployment and capital accumulation. Finally, we show that a higher initial capital stock does not necessarily mean a quicker attainment of self-sustained full employment.     

China's ‘later’ marriage policy and its demographic consequences

Using data from China's One-Per-Thousand Fertility Survey conducted in 1982, a cohort analysis is carried out to estimate the demographic consequences of the later marriage policy implemented in the People's Republic of China. The findings show that the later marriage policy had a strong positive effect on mean age at first marriage and first birth but a negative impact on the length of the first-birth interval, suggesting that the depressing effects on fertility of the administratively enforced postponement of marriage are more or less offset by adjustments over the first-birth interval by Chinese couples.     

Changing fertility rates in developed countries. The impact of labor market institutions

During the last two decades fertility rates have decreased and have become positively correlated with female participation rates across OECD countries. I use a panel of 23 OECD nations to study how different labor market arrangements shaped these trends. High unemployment and unstable contracts, common in Southern Europe, depress fertility, particularly of younger women. To increase lifetime income though early skill-acquisition and minimize unemployment risk, young women postpone (or abandon) childbearing. Further, both a large share of public employment, by providing employment stability, and generous maternity benefits linked to previous employment, such as those in Scandinavia, boost fertility of the 25–29 and 30–34 year old women.Financial help from a CRB grant from the University of Illinois is gratefully acknowledged. I would like to thank Carles Boix, Barry Chiswick, Carmel Chiswick, Evelyn Lehrer, three anonymous referees and seminar participants at ESPE 2000 (Bonn), Illinois Economic Meetings 2000 (Chicago), Simposi dAnalisi Economica 2000 (Barcelona), 2001 Winter meetings of the Econometric Society in New Orleans, ESPE 2001 (Athens), Braga (Portugal), University of Chicago, De Paul University, PAA 2002 (Atlanta) for helpful comments; Gosta Esping-Andersen for providing some data and Cristina Mora for excellent research assistance. Responsible editor: Junsen Zhang.     

Direct and indirect effects on infant mortality in a high-fertility US population

This article examines the direct and indirect effects of social and demographic measures on infant mortality using data from a church directory of the Old Order Amish of the Lancaster, PA, Settlement. The sample includes all infant deaths and a simple random sample of survivors (total n=2013). The results reveal that the death of the immediately prior sibling directly increases the risk of infant death nearly 30%, net of other factors. Also, the risk of mortality in the first year increases as birth order increases, particularly at the highest orders (8–17 prior sibs). Infants of the youngest mothers (age 13) are nearly 10% more likely to die in the first year of life than are infants of mothers age 24, nearly all of which is indirect via parity, prior sib death and birth interval. Further analysis shows that families adapting more rapidly to external community pressures face a higher risk of infant death than families living in more stable areas. These relationships emerge even in this homogeneous population with a relatively high standard of living and a traditional lifestyle, Implications are that indirect effects should be included in research on teen pregnancy and infant survival, and might be especially important for studies in transitional geographic areas.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1993 meetings of Population Association of America, Cincinnati.     

Demographic Efficiency: Concept and Estimation

The concept of demographic efficiency is proposed and data envelopment analysis (DEA) is introduced as a method for determining which countries are demographically efficient. While the purpose of the paper is primarily to introduce the concept and the method, several simple examples are used for purposes of illustration. The first two explore how efficiently countries have converted their level of development (the input) into male and female life expectancy at birth (the outputs). The second two reverse the postulated relationship, treating life expectancies as inputs reflecting general health status of a population, and level of development as the output. Countries are said to be efficient if they have achieved the maximum output observable for a given level of input, or if they have minimized the inputs needed to achieve a prescribed level of output. Together, the efficient cases form an efficiency frontier. DEA, a form of linear programming, also permits the degree of inefficiency of countries lying behind this frontier to be measured by calculating the extent of the output slacks that are present. Output slacks are the shortfalls in the level of performance that could have been achieved given the inputs available, and may themselves be treated as independent variables in explorations of the sources of demographic inefficiency. One example of such an exploration is offered—an attempt to account for shortfalls in female life expectancy, given levels of development.