The impact of the labour market on the timing of marriage and births in Spain

This paper investigates how education and the labour market affect Spanish individual decisions on the timing of marriage and births, using a Cox hazard approach. It disentangles men and women, and two groups, Cohort 1945–1960 and Cohort 1961–1977. Results show that female employment delays marriage in Cohort 1945–1960, but it has a reverse effect in Cohort 1961–1977. We also find evidence that employment is a barrier for family formation since employed women postpone births in both cohorts. The precarious Spanish labour markets, captured by female unemployment rates, delay family formation, especially by putting off marriage. Male unemployment, at the individual level, impacts negatively on fertility only through delaying marriage.

The earned income tax credit and fertility

Government programs designed to provide income safety nets often restrict eligibility to families with children, creating an unintended fertility incentive. This paper considers whether dramatically changing incentives in the earned income tax credit affect fertility rates in the USA. We use birth certificate data spanning the period 1990 to 1999 to test whether expansions in the credit influenced birthrate among targeted families. While economic theory would predict a positive fertility effect of the program for many eligible women, our results indicate that expanding the credit produced only extremely small reductions in higher order fertility among white women.

The effects of family caps on the subsequent fertility decisions of never-married mothers

Family caps seek to reduce fertility among welfare recipients by denying additional cash assistance to recipients who have children while on welfare. A necessary condition for family caps to be an effective policy tool is that welfare recipients respond to financial incentives in making decisions that affect subsequent fertility outcomes. This paper uses data from the 2001 and 2004 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to examine whether welfare mothers respond to the incentive provided by the Aid to Families with Dependent Children/Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (AFDC/TANF) system in determining whether or not to have a second child. The results show no evidence that family caps have an effect on the subsequent childbearing of never married women.

International migration and economic growth: a source country perspective

This study analyzes the impact of international migration on economic growth of a source country in a stochastic setting. The model accounts for endogenous fertility decisions and distinguishes between public and private schooling systems. We find that economic growth crucially depends on the international migration since the migration possibility will affect fertility decisions and school expenditures. Relaxation of restrictions on the emigration of high-skilled workers will damage the economic growth of a source country in the long run, although a ‘brain gain’ may happen in the short run. Furthermore, the growth rate of a source country under a private education regime will be more sensitive to the probability of migration than a country under a public education regime.

The effect of longevity on schooling and fertility: evidence from the Brazilian Demographic and Health Survey

This paper presents microevidence on the effect of adult longevity on schooling and fertility. Higher longevity is systematically associated with higher schooling and lower fertility. The paper looks at the 1996 Brazilian Demographic and Health Survey and constructs an adult longevity variable based on the mortality history of the respondent's family. Families with histories of high adult mortality in previous generations have systematically higher fertility and lower schooling. These effects are not associated with omitted variables and remain unchanged after a large array of factors is accounted for (demographic characteristics, family-specific child mortality, regional development, socioeconomic status, etc.).

Sibling size and investment in children’s education: an asian instrument

This study estimates the trade-off between child quantity and quality by exploiting exogenous variation in fertility under son preferences. Under son preferences, both sibling size and fertility timing are determined depending on the first child’s gender, which is random as long as parents do not abort girls at their first childbearing. For the sample South Korean households, I find strong evidence of unobserved heterogeneity in preferences for child quantity and quality across households. The trade-off is not as strong as observed cross-sectional relationships would suggest. However, even after controlling for unobserved heterogeneity, a greater number of siblings have adverse effects on per-child investment in education, in particular, when fertility is high.

Population Density is a Key Factor in Declining Human Fertility

In studying the complex determinants of human fertility, social scientists have given little attention to population density, although reproduction has been shown to be density-dependent for a wide variety of other species. Using fixed effects models on the time series of 145 countries and controlling for key social and economic variables, we find a consistent and significant negative relationship between human fertility and population density. Moreover, we find that individual fertility preferences also decline with population density. These findings suggest that population density should be included as a variable in future studies of fertility determinants.

Birth order matters: the effect of family size and birth order on educational attainment

Using the British Household Panel Survey, we investigate if family size and birth order affect children’s subsequent educational attainment. Theory suggests a trade-off between child quantity and “quality” and that siblings are unlikely to receive equal shares of parental resources devoted to children’s education. We construct a new birth order index that effectively purges family size from birth order and use this to test if siblings are assigned equal shares in the family’s educational resources. We find that the shares are decreasing with birth order. Ceteris paribus, children from larger families have less education, and the family size effect does not vanish when we control for birth order. These findings are robust to numerous specification checks.

Growth and inequality: a demographic explanation

This paper investigates the relationship between growth and inequality from a demographic point of view. In an extended model of the accidental bequest with endogenous fertility, we analyze the effects of a decrease in old-age mortality rate on the equilibrium growth rate as well as on the income distribution. We show that the relationship between growth and inequality is at first positive and then may be negative in the process of population aging. The results are consistent with the empirical evidence in some developed countries.

Child Mortality and Environment in Developing Countries

This paper studies child mortality and fertility in 61 developing countries including the Central Asian Republics (CARs). To control for simultaneity, an estimated value of fertility was used in the mortality equation and a final specification included only exogenous socio-economic, health and environmental variables. We confirm the importance of female literacy in explaining both fertility and mortality, and also find a measure of consumption for the poorest share of the population to be significant, while controlling for nutrition, health expenditure, and income distribution. Incidence of tuberculosis and female agricultural population proxy for environmental impacts, but in spite of these controls, approximately 41% additional mortality was estimated due to living in the CARs. The results fill gaps in the literature: we use a wider range of socio-economic and environmental health variables than previously in an encompassing analysis of mortality and fertility, and find evidence of excessive mortality in the CARs most likely linked to environmental degradation in the region.

Child mortality, fertility, and human capital accumulation

This article analyzes the impact of decline in child mortality on fertility and economic growth. The study shows that the timing of mortality relative to education is crucial to implications of mortality decline. If child mortality is realized before education starts, an exogenous decline in child mortality leads to a decline in education—a finding that is opposite to those of studies that considered a decline in mortality after the cost of education has been incurred. The work also demonstrates the role of parental human capital in reducing child mortality and the causal link between rising education and declining child mortality.

Growing old and staying young: population policy in an ageing closed economy

This paper analyses the relation between public pensions, fertility and child care in a closed-economy overlapping generations model with endogenous fertility. It is shown that raising a child involves two social externalities and that it is optimal to introduce child allowances if the government redistributes income from the young to the old. The optimal child allowance rises when longevity increases. If the costs of raising children depend positively on the wage, a third externality arises and the returns to savings should be taxed.

Earnings mobility among Italian low-paid workers

This paper uses Italian panel data to analyse low pay transitions since the early 1990s. Results indicate that having more human capital reduces the probability of falling into low pay, but there is little impact on raising exit rates from low pay. Human capital effects are found to be larger for women than for men. There is considerable state dependence: the experience of low pay raises the probability of subsequent low pay episodes. Also, there is substantial unobserved heterogeneity associated with factors such as initial conditions, mobility out of the earnings distribution and educational attainment.

An Empirical Test of a Neo-Malthusian Theory of Fertility Change

Some neo-Malthusians regard fertility as being kept in check by scarcities and constraints and, conversely, as being raised by economic prosperity. Since out-migration to developed countries and the receipt of food aid from developed countries relax the constraints imposed by a country’s carrying capacity, both will have a positive effect on fertility rates in developing countries. Moreover, better economic prospects will also raise fertility, all other things equal. This article provides an empirical test of these hypotheses derived from a neo-Malthusian theory of fertility change. The results fail to confirm the theory and often contradict it.

Fertility, child care outside the home, and pay-as-you-go social security

We examine the long-run effects of the pay-as-you-go (PAYG) social security scheme on fertility and welfare of individuals in an overlapping generations model, assuming that child-care services are available in the market. We show that the impact of a tax increase on fertility depends on the relative magnitudes of the standard intergenerational redistribution effect through the social security system, the (implicit) subsidy effect through tax-exemption of child rearing at home, and the price effect through changes in the relative price of market child care, and that if parental child-rearing time is inelastic, a tax cut could bring about a Pareto-improving allocation.

The impact of family policies on fertility in industrialized countries: a review of the literature

This paper examines the theoretical propositions and empirical evidence linking policies and fertility. More specifically, the analysis presented in this paper draws attention to the complex mechanisms that theoretically link policies and demographic outcomes: mechanisms that involve imperfect information and decisions that are rationally bound by very specific circumstances. As to the empirical evidence, studies provide mixed conclusions as to the effect of policies on fertility. While a small positive effect of policies on fertility is found in numerous studies, no statistically significant effect is found in others. Moreover, some studies suggest that the effect of policies tends to be on the timing of births rather than on completed fertility.

Dropping out of post-compulsory education in the UK: an analysis of determinants and outcomes

We analyse the decision to drop out of post-compulsory education over the period 1985–1994 using data from the Youth Cohort Surveys. We show that the dropout rate declined between 1985 and 1994, in spite of the rising participation rate in education, but is still substantial. Dropping out is more or less constant over the period of study, though the risk of dropout does vary with young people’s prior attainment, ethnicity, family background and the state of the labour market. The course of study has a substantial effect on the risk of dropout.

Personality traits and gender-specific income expectations in Dutch higher education

In this article we examine gender differences in income expectations of students in higher education. We found quite large gender differences. Men and women differ significantly in the income they expect to earn at the top of their career. We examined how much personality traits contribute to explain gender differences in income expectations, and to what extent personality typologies can add to insights about earnings potential derived from human capital theory. The research shows that personality does affect expected income, that impact goes beyond personality’s indirect effects, which are conveyed largely through gender differences and students’ choice of study subject.

First Exits from the Swedish Labor Market Due to Disability

Nowadays, with an increasingly aging population, an increasing proportion of the population on disability benefits, and an implicitly lower level of economic output and foregone tax revenue, disability has become a major public policy issue in many countries. Estimating both single risk and competing risks models on a Swedish longitudinal database, this study analyzes the risk of exit from the labor market due to disability at a certain age, conditional on having remained in the labor force until that age. The explanatory variables did not have identical coefficients across destination types. For example, the estimated single risk model shows that a higher level of education decreased the hazard of exiting the labor market with a disability pension, while the estimated competing risks model suggests that a higher level of education increased the hazard of exiting with a partial disability pension, but it decreased the hazard of exiting with a full disability pension.

The new economics of education: methods,evidence and policy

In this paper (my keynote talk from the 2006 ESPE conference), I discuss the recent upsurge in research on the economics of education that has occurred, especially in Europe. I discuss the reasons for the increased interest and present some examples from my recent research in the area. The paper concludes that the increased research interest seems likely to be sustained for some time to come.