As low birth weight babies grow,can well-educated parents buffer this adverse factor? A research note

This research note combines two national Taiwanese data sets to investigate the relationships among low birth weight (LBW) babies, their parents' educational levels, and their future academic outcomes. We find that LBW is negatively correlated with the probability of such children attending college at age 18; however, when both parents are college or high school graduates, such negative effects may be partially offset. We also show that discrimination against daughters occurs, but only for daughters who were LBW babies. Moreover high parental education can buffer the LBW shock only among moderately LBW children (as compared with very LBW children) and full-term LBW children (as compared with preterm LBW children).     

Race,military service,and marital timing: Evidence from the NLSY-79

I use data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Study of Youth to examine the relationship between military service and marital timing for white men and black men during the 1980s. I use information about active-duty and reserve-duty service as well as veteran status to implement strong controls for selectivity. I find that active-duty military service increases the probability of first marriage for both whites and blacks. In part, this relationship is due to positive selectivity into the military and, for whites, to greater income and economic stability. Above and beyond the effects of selectivity, income, and economic stability, the effect of active-duty military service is particularly strong for black men.     

The demography of disability and the effects of immigrant history: Older Asians in the United States

Using data from the 2000 U.S. census, we compare the older Asian population with U.S.-born, non-Hispanic whites with respect to three indicators of disability. Insofar as any Asian "advantage" in health vis-a-vis whites exists among the population aged 65 and over, our evidence suggests that it occurs primarily among the U.S.-born segments of this population. We also investigate how differences in disability levels among Asian immigrant groups are influenced by country of birth and by the combined effects of duration of residence in the United States and life cycle stage at entry. These results highlight the diversity of the older Asian population with respect to the ways in which immigration and origin history are linked to disability outcomes. We conclude that in later life, immigrant status confers few disability advantages among the Asian population in the United States.     

Strength of attachment: Survey coverage of people with tenuous ties to residences

This article draws on evidence from an exploratory survey of living situations to assess the validity of assumptions about residence and to offer methodological innovations to improve coverage of people with tenuous attachment to households. These innovations include more inclusive probes and questions used to compile the roster of household residents; a review of the places a person stayed the previous few months; and a Residential Attachment scale that measures strength of attachment to households. This scale shows that it takes more probing to list tenuously attached people than most surveys do, suggesting that tenuously attached people are likely to be omitted from the typical survey roster. The Residential Attachment scale is correlated with social and economic participation in households, suggesting that participation is fairly high even among those with tenuous or no residential attachment.     

Child support and father-child contact: Testing reciprocal pathways

I use three waves of panel data to examine the relationship between child support payments and fathers' contact with their nonmarital children. I disaggregate support into fathers' formal and informal payments and incorporate cross-lagged effects models to identify the direction of causality between payments and contact. After including the behavior from the prior wave (lagged term) and a rich set of family characteristics, I find a marginally significant effect of paying formally at Time 1 on the likelihood of contact at Time 2 but no effect of contact at Time 1 on formal payments at Time 2. In the first examination of the relationship between informal support and father-child contact, I find a strong, positive reciprocal relationship between the likelihood and frequency of father-child contact and the likelihood and amount of informal support, with slightly stronger and more consistent effects of contact on payments than of payments on contact.     

Widowhood,family size,and post-reproductive Mortality: a comparative Analysis of three populations in Nineteenth-Century Europe

Researchers from a number of disciplines have offered competing theories about the effects oJ childbearing on parents 'postreproductive longevity. The "disposable soma theory" argues that investments in somatic maintenance increase longevity but reduce childbearing. "Maternal depletion" models suggest that the rigors of childrearing increase mortality in later years. Other researchers consider continued childbearing a sign of healthy aging and a predictor of future longevity. Empirical studies have produced inconsistent and contradictory results. Our focus is on the experience of widowhood, which has been ignored in previous studies. We hypothesize that the death of a spouse is a stressful event with long-term consequences for health, especially for women with small children. Data are drawn from historical sources in Sweden, Belgium, and the Netherlands from 1766 to 1980. Postreproductive mortality was highest among young widows with larger families in all three samples. Age at last birth had little or no effect. We conclude that raising children under adverse circumstances can have long-lasting, harmful effects on a mother's health.     

Family transitions in Young Adulthood

Using the first (1995) and third (2001-2002) waves of the Add Health survey, we examine women 's family transitions up to age 24. Only a third of all women marry, and a fifth of those marriages dissolve before age 24. Three out of eight women have afirst birth, with a substantial majority of those births outside of marriage: 66% for whites, 96% for blacks, and 72% for Mexican Americans. Cohabitation is the predominant union form; 59% of women cohabit at least once by age 24. Most cohabitations are short lived, with approximately one in five resulting in a marriage. We summarize the family and relationship experience of women up to age 24 in terms offour categories, each accounting for roughly a quarter of all women. Category 1 has the women who remain single nonparents. Category 2 has the early marriers, women whose marriage is not preceded by a first birth. Category 3 has those who become single parents. Category 4 has the women who cohabit at least once, but who do not marry or have a birth by age 24. The strictly ordered transitions of the 1950s are long gone and have been replaced by a variety of paths to adulthood.     

How do marital status,work effort,and wage rates interact?

How marital status interacts with men's earnings is an important analytic and policy issue, especially in the context of debates in the United States over programs that encourage healthy marriage. This paper generates new findings about the earnings-marriage relationship by estimating the linkages among flows into and out of marriage, work effort, and wage rates. The estimates are based on National Longitudinal Survey of Youth panel data, covering 23 years of marital and labor market outcomes, and control for unobserved heterogeneity. We estimate marriage effects on hours worked (our proxy for work effort) and on wage rates for all men and for black and low-skilled men separately. The estimates reveal that entering marriage raises hours worked quickly and substantially but that marriage's effect on wage rates takes place more slowly while men continue in marriage. Together; the stimulus to hours worked and wage rates generates an 18%-19% increase in earnings, with about one-third to one-half of the marriage earnings premium attributable to higher work effort. At the same time, higher wage rates and hours worked encourage men to marry and to stay married. Thus, being married and having high earnings reinforce each other over time.     

Was there compression of disability for older Americans from 1992 to 2003?

Medical advances and the growth of the elderly population have focused interest on trends in the health of the elderly. Three theories have been advanced to describe these trends: compression of morbidity, expansion of morbidity, and dynamic equilibrium. We applied multistate life table methods to the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey to estimate active and disabled life expectancy from 1992 to 2003, defining disability as having difficulty with instrumental activities of daily living or activities of daily living. We found increases in active life expectancy past age 65 and decreases in life expectancy with severe disability. These trends are consistent with elements of both the theory of compression of morbidity and the theory of dynamic equilibrium.     

ATTITUDES TOWARDS THE EURO: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY BASED ON THE GERMAN SOCIO-ECONOMIC PANEL (SOEP)

This paper investigates changing attitudes towards the euro over time in Germany using longitudinal micro-data from the German Socio Economic Panel Study. We observe that a large part of the German population was worried about the new currency both before and after its introduction. Social psychological theories provide insight into these attitudes. Concerns regarding the euro are apparently connected with problems in handling the new currency and with the press coverage of price rises. For these reasons, future EMU member states should prepare their populations better for these challenges.