Performance Pay,the Gender Gap,and Specialization within Marriage

We show that the large gender earnings gap at the top of the distribution (the glass ceiling) and the motherhood penalty are associated with each other and that both are uniquely associated with performance pay. These patterns appear consistent with specialization by gender. We show that among married couples with children, the hours worked by wives are strongly and persistently negatively correlated with earnings of the husbands only when those husbands work in performance pay jobs. There is no correlation between husbands’ hours and wives’ earnings.     

The middling mobile: finding place in the liquid city

The middling mobile, differentiated by their modest and unsure mobility, are a vast of bulk of people who intend or expect to move on. As they travel, they tread differing intensities of rhythm and social embeddedness felt to be chaotic, constraining, liberating, or comforting. Owing to their aspirations to ‘get out’ of a rhythmic life, or to move somewhere familiar, the middling mobile use movement and rootedness to navigate and manage everyday life in the liquid city. My analysis offers a holistic exposition of a life that flows between mobility/immobility and rhythmic/arrhythmic forms, and the transitions between them.     

The Astonishing Population Averted by China’s Birth Restrictions: Estimates,Nightmares, and Reprogrammed Ambitions

China launched an unprecedented program to control its population in 1971. Experts have dismissed the official estimate of 400 million births averted by this program as greatly exaggerated yet neglect to provide their own estimates. Counterfactual projections based on fertility declines in other countries suggest that China’s program-averted population numbered 360–520 million as of 2015. The low end of this range is based on Vietnam—China’s best national comparator, with a two-child program of its own—and the high end is based on a 16-country comparator selected, ironically, by critics of the official estimate. The latter comparator further implies that China’s one-child program itself averted a population of 400 million by 2015, three-quarters of the total averted population. All such estimates are projected to double by 2060, due mostly to counterfactual population momentum. These and other findings presented herein affirm the astonishing impact of China’s draconian policy choices and challenge the current consensus that rapid socioeconomic progress drove China’s fertility well below two children per family. International comparisons of fertility and income suggest instead that China’s very low fertility arrived two or three decades too soon. If China had not harshly enforced a norm of 1.5-children during the last quarter century, most mothers would have had two children, one-half birth higher than observed.     

Assessing the Tongzhi Label: Self-Identification and Public Opinion

Tongzhi is one of several Chinese terms that refer to individuals who are attracted to the same sex. Using data from two different surveys in Hong Kong, this research note examines how the term tongzhi coexists with other terms. We investigate the prevalence of self-identification as tongzhi, and we explore the extent to which using the term tongzhi influences public attitudes toward gay people and gay rights. Activists began popularizing the term tongzhi in the late 1980s, but less than one third of the participants in our 2008 survey of sexual orientation minorities (n = 728) described themselves as tongzhi. Using a split-ballot experiment in a 2013 public opinion poll (n = 831), we found that attitudes toward gay people and gay rights were not significantly impacted by whether questions were phrased in terms of tongzhi or the main alternative term tongxinglianzhe. We discuss how our findings can enrich understandings of earlier research and illuminate avenues for future study.     

To stay or to go? Postretirement housing choices of single Baby Boomer women

Single women of the Baby Boomer generation are often financially disadvantaged in the retirement planning process due to their lower accumulated savings compared to male retirees. This disadvantage impacts significant consumption decisions such as postretirement housing choices. This study uses the theory of planned behavior to examine how certainty in intentions influences preparing and planning for postretirement housing. A typology of single Baby Boomer women is developed based on their financial, demographic, and psychological circumstances. Each segment likely requires different informational strategies and financial services to foster proactive planning for retirement. Significant implications exist for social policy and the financial services sector.     

Stymied ambition: does a lack of economic freedom lead to migration?

We investigate the relationship between economic freedom and international migration for the 1980–2010 period using a dataset on migration from 91 emerging countries to the 20 most attractive OECD destination countries. We find that more economic freedom at home discourages high-skilled migration, but not low-skilled migration. The negative association between economic freedom and high-skilled emigration also holds when we estimate (dynamic) panel models that allow for endogeneity in the economic freedom-migration nexus. In sum, our findings suggest that high-skilled migration is especially responsive to the economic incentives resulting from economic freedom.     

Is education a risk factor or social vaccine against HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa? The effect of schooling across public health periods

Early in the 30-year HIV/AIDS pandemic in Sub-Saharan Africa, epidemiological studies identified formal education attainment as a risk factor: educated Sub-Saharan Africans had a higher risk of contracting HIV/AIDS than their less educated peers. Later demographic research reported that by the mid-1990s the education effect had reversed, and education began to function as a social vaccine. Recent counter-evidence finds a curvilinear pattern, with the association between educational attainment and HIV/AIDS infection changing from positive to negative across the education gradient. To reconcile these inconsistent conclusions, a hypothesis is developed and tested that education at early stages functioned as a risk factor and later functioned (and continues to function) as a social vaccine. We reason that this shift in the direction of the education effect was concurrent with changes in the public health environment in SSA that early on heightened material benefits from educational attainment but later heightened cognitive benefits from schooling. Using the 2003/2004 Demographic Health Surveys from four Sub-Saharan African countries (Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya and Tanzania), we tested this hypothesis (differential effects of schooling) using non-linear regression analysis (probit), identifying the different public health periods and controlling for confounding factors. The results support the hypothesis that the education effect shifted historically in the HIV/AIDS pandemic in SSA as we hypothesized.     

Mangrove forests store high densities of carbon across the tropical urban landscape of Singapore

Tropical forested ecosystems provide multiple ecosystem services to rural and urban landscapes, with carbon storage gaining particular attention. Deforestation due to rural-urban transitions may lead to a reduction in carbon storage ability. Coastal mangrove forests are particularly at risk from deforestation due to their location in the rapidly urbanizing coastal zone, and the city state of Singapore is an extreme example, losing as much as 90 % of its original mangrove cover due to land reclamation and reservoir construction. Knowledge of mangrove ecosystem services may allow better conservation, restoration and incorporation of remaining mangrove patches into the urban landscape. Focusing on the regulating ecosystem service of carbon storage, mangrove carbon stocks have been estimated for Singapore using a combination of field and remote sensing techniques. Biomass carbon showed substantial spatial variation, with old, contiguous mangrove patches containing a higher density of biomass carbon than fragmented, river-fringing or restored mangroves. In total, national biomass carbon equated to 116,117.1 megagrams of carbon (Mg C), and a coarse estimate of the total carbon stock (including soil carbon) suggests that Singapore’s mangroves may store 450,571.7 Mg C. While lower than other regional estimates focused on natural, oceanic mangroves, this is a significant carbon stock for a disturbed, urban mangrove system, and may be equivalent to the average annual carbon emissions of 621,000 residents. This analysis, alongside a review of other urban forest studies, highlights the importance of forested ecosystems such as mangroves in providing a carbon storage ecosystem service to urban areas.     

Kontexteffekte in Familien – Angleichung von Paaren und intergenerationale Transmission am Beispiel Religiosität

The present contribution shows conceptual and methodological approaches for the study of social context effects within families. Family members mutually constitute the social context in which family behavior and personality development take place. Social influence in families becomes evident empirically in family members’ significant similarity concerning a wide variety of characteristics. The present study focuses on intrafamily convergence with regard to religiousness. In an empirical illustration, both (a) horizontal intracouple alignment and (b) vertical intergenerational transmission processes are examined. Besides the finding that experiences during religious socialization in the parental home have a stronger impact than partner influences in adulthood, our analyses show that social context effects are more pronounced the stronger the cohesion of the respective interaction dyad is (e.g., according to measures of relationship quality).