Family influences on family size preferences

Several studies have demonstrated important effects of parents’ childbearing behavior on their children’s childbearing preferences and behavior. The study described here advances our understanding of these family influences by expanding the theoretical model to include parental preferences, siblings’ behavior, and changes in children’s preferences through early adulthood. Using intergenerational panel data from mothers and their children, we test the effects of both mothers’ preferences for their own fertility and mothers’ preferences for their children’s fertility. Although both types of maternal preferences influence children’s childbearing preferences, mothers’ preferences for their children’s behavior have the stronger and more proximate effects. Mothers’ preferences continue to influence their children’s preferences through early adulthood; siblings’ fertility is an additional determinant of children’s family size preferences.     

Developmental Idealism and Cultural Models of the Family in Malawi

This paper examines the extent to which developmental idealism has been disseminated in Malawi. Developmental idealism is a set of beliefs and values about development and the relationships between development and family structures and behavior. Developmental idealism states that attributes of societies and families defined as modern are better than attributes defined as traditional, that modern societies help produce modern families, that modern families facilitate the achievement of modern societies, and that the future will bring family change in the direction of modernity. Previous research has demonstrated that knowledge of developmental idealism is widespread in many places around the world, but provides little systematic data about it in sub-Saharan Africa or how knowledge of it is associated with certain demographic characteristics in that region. In this paper, we address this issue by examining whether ordinary people in two settings in Malawi, a sub-Saharan African country, have received and understood messages that are intended to associate development with certain types of family forms and family behaviors. We then examine associations between demographic characteristics and developmental idealism to investigate possible mechanisms linking global discourse about development to the grassroots. We analyze data collected in face-to-face surveys from two samples of Malawian men in 2009 and 2010, one rural, the other in a low-to-medium income neighborhood of a city. Our analysis of these survey data shows considerable evidence that many developmental idealism beliefs have been spread in that country and that education has positive effects on beliefs in the association between development and family attributes. We also find higher levels of developmental idealism awareness in the urban sample than we do in the rural sample, but once dissimilarities in education and wealth between the two samples are controlled, awareness levels no longer differed between urban and rural respondents. We explore how these beliefs intersect with longstanding local values and beliefs in Malawi.     

Mortality in late nineteenth-century Montreal: geographic pathways of contagion

In the City of Montreal, 1881, the presence of three cultural communities with different profiles of economic status makes it possible to observe the way social settings affected survival over a lifetime. Regression models show culturally determined maternal factors dominant for infants, and persistent throughout childhood. For post-neonates, children aged 1-4, and adults aged 15-59 household poverty has a comparable effect. Among adults, a gender penalty differs among the three communities. Models are improved when differentiated by cause of death. Locating households using a GIS reveals high levels of residential segregation by ethnicity and income, spatial correlation of environmental hazards, and constraints on exit from zones of risk, which together produce neighbourhood effects as large as household effects. Attention to groups excluded (foundlings and inmates of institutions) confirms that models limited to full household-level information significantly underestimate the impacts of poverty and exclusion.     

AN ALTERNATIVE VARIANCE-REDUCTION STRATEGY FOR RSM SIMULATION STUDIES

In the previous paper, Cooley and Houck [1] examined the simultaneous use of common and antithetic random number streams as a variance-reduction strategy for simulation studies employing response surface methodology (RSM). Our paper supplements their work and further explores pseudorandom number assignments in response surface designs. Specifically, an alternative strategy for assigning pseudorandom numbers is proposed; this strategy is more efficient than that given by Cooley and Houck, especially when more than two factors are involved.     

Foreign Experts＇ Advices： from Understanding to Execution

How does the Chinese Government might attract more foreign expert talent toChina and how, mote generally, the Government might deepen, extend, and refine its use of foreign experts to further help Chin...     

International Fertility Change: New Data and Insights From the Developmental Idealism Framework

Many scholars have offered structural and ideational explanations for the fertility changes occurring around the world. This paper focuses on the influence of developmental idealism—a schema or set of beliefs endorsing development, fertility change, and causal connections between development and fertility. Developmental idealism is argued to be an important force affecting both population policy and the fertility behavior of ordinary people. We present new survey data from ordinary people in six countries—Argentina, China, Egypt, Iran, Nepal, and the United States—about the extent to which developmental idealism is known and believed. We ask individuals if they believe that fertility and development are correlated, that development is a causal force in changing fertility levels, and that fertility declines enhance the standard of living and intergenerational relations. We also ask people about their expectations concerning future trends in fertility in their countries and whether they approve or disapprove of the trends they expect. The data show widespread linkage in the minds of ordinary people between fertility and development. Large fractions of people in these six settings believe that fertility and development are correlated, that development reduces fertility, and that declines in fertility foster development. Many also expect and endorse future declines in fertility.     

FISCAL RULES AND GOVERNMENT BORROWING COSTS: INTERNATIONAL EVIDENCE

We find that the adoption of numerical fiscal rules reduces government borrowing costs in a sample of 101 advanced and developing countries for 1985–2010. We apply a variety of propensity score matching methods to address the self‐selection problem of policy adoption and find strong evidence that fiscal rules have large and significant treatment effects on lowering government borrowing costs in both international and domestic financial markets. The results are robust to changes in country sample and alternative estimation methodology, and are consistent with fiscal rules helping to build policy credibility by reducing the probability of default and the “risk premium” on government debt that compensates lenders for this possibility. (JEL E43, G12, H60)     

The Navajo–U.S. Population Mortality Crossover since the Mid-20th Century

Mortality crossovers at older ages have been observed when comparing different populations, particularly disadvantaged populations with advantaged populations. A growing body of research indicates that mortality convergences to actual crossovers are real and not a result of overstating of age at the older ages. Only recently have the mortality experiences of Native Americans been compared with those of other Americans; specific Native American tribal populations have not been examined, however. Presented here are the mortality experiences of the Navajo and those of the total U.S. population and U.S. white population since the mid-20th century. Comparison provides further support to findings that convergences and crossovers actually occur between disadvantaged and advantaged populations.     

On the interpretation of age-earnings profiles

Many economists use cross-sectional age-earnings profiles to describe the course of earnings over the worklife of the average worker. We argue that such an interpretation is not typically correct. After citing numerous examples of such erroneous interpretations from the literature, we explain why cross-sectional profiles fail to accurately portray longitudinal earnings profiles and show how different the two sets of profiles can be. The authors thank an anonymous referee for helpful comments. Parts of this draft were written while Robert Thornton was a visiting professor of economics at University College Dublin (Ireland).