Book reviews

The World of the Child: Clinical and Cultural Studies from Birth to Adolescence. Toby Talbot. (New York: Jason Aronson, 1974.)

The Male Dilemma. Anne Steinmann and David J. Fox. (New York: Jason Aronson, 1974.)

La Causa Chicana: The Movement for Justice. Margaret M. Mangold. (New York: Family Service Association of America, 1972.)

Psychiatry and Ethics. Maurice Levine, M.D. (New York: George Braziller, 1972.)     

The Effect of Couple Disagreement about Child‐Timing Intentions: A Parity‐Specific Approach

Using couple data from a longitudinal study conducted in Italy, a country with persistently low fertility levels, we examined the effect of partners' discrepant child‐timing intentions on reproductive behavior. We found that the effect of couple disagreement on subsequent fertility is parity‐specific and does not depend on whether only the male or the female partner intends to have a(nother) child. The disagreement tends to produce an intermediate childbearing outcome at parities zero and one, while the outcome is shifted more toward agreement on not having a(nother) child at parity two. The empirical evidence suggests that gender equality in reproductive decisionmaking is not driven by partners' equal bargaining power or partners' equal access to economic resources. The findings indicate that the predictive power of child‐timing intentions strongly improves if both partners' views are considered in fertility models, and thus support the adoption of couple analysis in fertility research.     

Dropping the Books and Working Off the Books

The paper empirically tests the relationship between underground labour and schooling achievement for Italy, a country ranking badly in both respects when compared with other high‐income economies, with a marked duality between North and South. In order to identify underground workers, we exploit the information on individuals' social security positions available from the Bank of Italy's Survey on Household Income and Wealth. After controlling for a wide range of sociodemographic and economic variables and addressing potential endogeneity and selection issues, we show that a low level of education sizeably and significantly increases the probability of working underground. Switching from completing compulsory school to graduating at college more than halves this probability for both men and women. The gain is slightly higher for individuals completing the compulsory track with respect to those having no formal education at all. The different probabilities found for self‐employed and dependent workers support the view of a dual informal sector, in which necessity and desirability coexist.     

Landed Gender: Rural Couples Caught Between Traditional and Contemporary Roles

The words ‘rural Australia’ summon images of big men in Akubras, CWA ladies with loaded plates of scones and cream, sheep‐dotted hillsides and summer's golden wheat. On the surface this is the good life, and even though many people are now aware that rural Australia is suffering, there is little said about what is happening behind closed doors. The couple relationship bears the brunt of the growing pressures on those who live on the land, but it has its own inner conflicts and can hardly sustain these additional pressures. These couples do not tell their story in public, they guard their privacy jealously, and only as a last hope will they come to counselling. The common theme that emerges is that of the meeting of old and new roles—the traditional expectations of relationship (typically held by the man and his family) encountering more contemporary expectations (typically held by the woman or ‘outsider’). Here is their untold story.     

Optimal weighing designs with a string property

We consider the usual (spring balance) weighing design set-up with the design matrix having a string property meaning thereby that in every row of it, there is exactly one run of 1's (the rest of the elements being 0's). We have investigated some interesting features of such matrices and used them in deriving various optimality results.