The More the Merrier? The Causal Effect of High Fertility on Later-Life Loneliness in Eastern Europe

Levels of later-life loneliness are high in Eastern Europe. We assess whether having more children is protective against later-life loneliness for Eastern-European mothers and fathers. Drawing on Generations and Gender Surveys data of 25,479 parents aged 50–80 from eight Eastern-European countries, we adopt an instrumental approach exploiting parents’ preference for mixed-sex offspring to estimate the causal effect of having additional children on feelings of loneliness. We find that having an additional child has a causal protective effect against loneliness for mothers. Ordinary least squares regression models also show a weak but statistically significant negative association between number of children and later-life loneliness among fathers. However, results of the instrumental variable analyses are inconclusive for this group. We thus do not find statistically significant causal evidence that having an additional child is protective against loneliness for fathers. Our results underline the importance of addressing reverse causality and selection bias when investigating the links between number of children and later-life loneliness, particularly among women. The causal evidence presented here suggests that the trend towards families with fewer children noted in several Eastern-European countries may place new cohorts of older Eastern-Europeans, and in particular Eastern-European women, at risk of stronger feelings of loneliness.

     

Eighteen‐Month‐Old Infants Correct Non‐Conforming Actions by Others

At around their third birthday, children begin to enforce social norms on others impersonally, often using generic normative language, but little is known about the developmental building blocks of this abstract norm understanding. Here, we investigate whether even toddlers show signs of enforcing on others interpersonally how “we” do things. In an initial dyad, 18‐month‐old infants learnt a simple game‐like action from an adult. In two experiments, the adult either engaged infants in a normative interactive activity (stressing that this is the way “we” do it) or, as a non‐normative control, marked the same action as idiosyncratic, based on individual preference. In a test dyad, infants had the opportunity to spontaneously intervene when a puppet partner performed an alternative action. Infants intervened, corrected, and directed the puppet more in the normative than in the non‐normative conditions. These findings suggest that, during the second year of life, infants develop second‐personal normative expectations about their partner's behavior (“You should do X!”) in social interactions, thus making an important step toward understanding the normative structure of human cultural activities. These simple normative expectations will later be scaled up to group‐minded and abstract social norms.     

Effects of garden management practices,by different types of gardeners,on human wellbeing and ecological and soil sustainability in Swiss cities

Urban Ecosystems - Gardens have effects on the local ecology as well as on the wellbeing of the gardener, but few studies have attempted to study gardens using both ecological and social outcome...     

Some Considerations on Well-Being Evaluation Procedures,Taking the Cue from “Exploring Multidimensional Well-Being in Switzerland: Comparing Three Synthesizing Approaches”

In this short paper, we outline some considerations on three different procedures for the statistical evaluation of multidimensional well-being, taking the cue from a recent paper of Iglesias et al. There, the authors apply and compare Confirmatory Factor Analysis, the Alkire–Foster counting approach and the Partial Order Approach on real data, pointing out limitations and potentialities of each procedure. To deepen, and partially correct, some of their (albeit interesting) remarks, here we review the fundamental features of those approaches, so as to shed light on their structural differences and to show that they move from, and may lead to, alternative views on well-being.     

Guess who’s coming to dinner: the case of IC reporting in Italy

Journal of Management and Governance - In the last 2 decades, intellectual capital (IC) reporting has been promoted with the idea that it can lead to internal (managerial) and external...     

The Older Sandwich Generation Across European Welfare Regimes: Demographic and Social Considerations

European Journal of Population - The lengthening of the amount of time adult children depend on their parents’ support and rising longevity have pushed scholars to devote increasing attention...     

与供应商共赢

零售商跟供应商一快速消费品公司一向来是敌手。双方会在价格上磨来磨去,促销活动上斤斤计较,市场预算上讨价还价,长期分歧上拉锯作战。结果,关系破坏了,收益减少了一次年,再重开谈判。     

Matching and Network Effects

The matching of individuals in teams is a key element in the functioning of an economy. The network of social ties can potentially transmit important information on abilities and reputations and also help mitigate matching frictions by facilitating interactions among “screened” individuals. We conjecture that the probability of two individuals forming a team falls in the distance between the two individuals in the network of existing social ties. The objective of this paper is to empirically test this conjecture. We examine the formation of coauthor relations among economists over a twenty‐year period. Our principal finding is that a new collaboration emerges faster among two researchers if they are “closer” in the existing coauthor network among economists. This proximity effect on collaboration is strong: Being at a network distance of 2 instead of 3, for instance, raises the probability of initiating a collaboration by 27%. (JEL: C78, D83, D85)