The Great Recession,Fertility, and Uncertainty: Evidence From the United States

The Great Recession produced the highest rates of unemployment and foreclosure in the United States since the Great Depression. In this article the author examines the consequences of these poor economic conditions for fertility in the United States by estimating the effect of area‐level economic conditions on state fertility in the years leading up to and including the Great Recession. The economic impacts of the Great Recession, captured by state‐level economic conditions, had a strong negative effect on fertility in models with state and year fixed effects. These reductions in fertility were likely caused both by increased economic hardship and increased economic uncertainty.     

SOCIAL COMPARISON AND EFFORT PROVISION: EVIDENCE FROM A FIELD EXPERIMENT

Social comparison has potentially far reaching consequences in many economic domains. We conducted a field experiment to examine how social comparison affects workers' effort provision if their own wage or that of a co‐worker is cut. Workers were assigned to groups of two, performed identical individual tasks, and received the same performance‐independent hourly wage. Cutting both group members' wages caused a decrease in performance. But when only one group member's wage was cut, the affected workers decreased their performance more than twice as much as when both workers' wages were cut. This finding indicates that social comparison among workers affects effort provision because the only difference between the two wage‐cut treatments is the other group member's wage level. In contrast, workers whose wage was not cut but who witnessed their group member's pay being cut displayed no change in performance relative to the baseline treatment in which both workers' wages remained unchanged. This indicates that social comparison exerts asymmetric effects on effort.     

The social condition of the New Zealand people: a pre-election review of social indicator information

ABSTRACT

Many social commentators have considered that alongside the fiscal transparency enjoined by contemporary New Zealand governments, there should be a complementary social responsibility reporting. This task is usually assigned to social indicator frameworks. However, at present (as the 2017 election looms) there is a faltering in the provision of social indicators which have been in place in New Zealand for almost two decades, with the exception of the recent 2016 survey data from Statistics New Zealand and Ministry of Social Development that were made available within a month of writing this article. Having commented on the current status of the New Zealand social indicator system, we present data from the General Social Survey and the Quality of Life survey to at least convey recent trends in subjective social well-being and reported behaviours and experiences. References are also made to the accumulating literature on social well-being in New Zealand, followed by suggestions for more systematic indicator development and underpinning research.     

Infant locomotion shapes proximity to adults during everyday play in the U.S.

Learning to walk expands infants’ access to the physical environment and prompts changes in their communicative behaviors. However, little is known about whether walking also shapes infants’ proximity to their adult social partners during everyday activities at home. Here we followed 89 infants (42 boys, 47 girls; 92% White, not Hispanic or Latino) longitudinally and documented connections between infant locomotion and infant-adult proximity on two timescales: (1) across developmental time, by comparing data from a session when infants could only crawl to a later session when they could walk (M walk onset = 12.15 months, range = 8-15); and (2) in real time, by testing whether the amount of time that infants spent in motion (regardless of their locomotor status) related to their interpersonal distance to adults. The developmental transition to walking corresponded to a significant, but modest, decrease in infant-adult proximity. Infants’ moment-to-moment locomotion, however, was strongly related to patterns of interpersonal distance: infants who spent more time in motion spent less time near adults and instigated more proximity transitions, resulting in shorter and more dispersed bouts of proximity throughout sessions. Findings shed new light on how infants’ motor achievements can reverberate across other domains of development, and how changes in infant development that researchers often observe over months arise from infants’ moment-to-moment experiences.     

JOINT PRODUCT COST ALLOCATION IN THE CONTEXT OF COST-PLUS PRICING DETERMINATIONS WITH NON-UNIFORM MARKUPS

Companies that use cost-based pricing sometimes manufacture products that involve joint cost allocation. A problem with this is that, while product prices are a function of the full cost, joint cost allocation methods using net realizable values depend on the product prices. This paper demonstrates that when all costs and production quantities are known or can be budgeted, it is possible to simultaneously determine unique product prices (having non-uniform markup rates) and cost allocations using the net realizable value method.