Time series analysis of fertility and female labor market behavior

Cointegration methods are employed to investigate relations among total fertility, female wages, labor force participation, educational attainment, and male relative cohort size. Two long run relations among the series are found, and these are identified as a fertility and a labor supply equation. All covariates enter into these relations with significant coefficients and theoretically plausible signs. Innovation analysis shows that both fertility and female labor force participation respond to changes in relative cohort size in directions consistent with the Easterlin hypothesis. Female labor force participation responds significantly to fertility shocks, but reverse effects are insignificant.All correspondence to Robert McNown. The authors wish to thank Cristobal Ridao-Cano, Kenneth Land, Alessandro Cigno, and an anonymous referee for comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Responsible editor: Alessandro Cigno.     

Measuring socioeconomic status in health research in developing countries: Should we be focusing on households,communities or both?

Research on the effects of socioeconomic well-being on health is important for policy makers in developing countries, where limited resources make it crucial to use existing health care resources to the best advantage. This paper develops and tests a set of measures of socioeconomic status indicators for predicting health status in developing countries. We construct socioeconomic indexes that capture both household and community attributes so as to allow us to separate the social from the purely economic dimensions of the socioeconomic status within a cross-national perspective, with applications to data from Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) fielded in five African countries in the 1990s. This study demonstrates the distinctive contributions of socioeconomic indexes measured at the household vs. community level in understanding inequalities in health and survival and underlines the importance of going beyond the purely economic view of socioeconomic status to cover the multidimensional as well as multilevel concept of economic and social inequality.     

Productive Activities And Subjective Well-Being Among Older Adults: The Influence Of Number Of Activities And Time Commitment

This study examines relationships among three measures of subjective well-being (life satisfaction, happiness and depressive symptoms), and two global measures of productive activity (number of activities and time commitment). We argue that participation in multiple productive activities should increase subjective well-being because these behaviors increase social integration and provide meaningful social roles. Using the first two waves of the Americans’ Changing Lives survey, we estimate a series of OLS and ordered logistic regression models to examine this issue among a sample of respondents 60 years old and older. Our multivariate regression results show that as time committed to productive activities increases, life satisfaction increases. Both increasing numbers of productive activities and increasing time commitment predict higher levels of happiness. Also, we find only modest support for a relationship between productive activities and the number of and changes in depressive symptoms. Our results provide support for the idea that engaging in productive activities is beneficial to older persons’ well-being, implying confirmation of the role enhancement hypothesis and demonstrating the importance of social integration.This research was partially supported by a grant from the National Institute on Aging (R03 AG018910). We thank Jan Mutchler for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.     

Where are the Children? Children’s Role in Measuring and Monitoring Their Well-Being

This paper starting point is the dynamic changes and shifts in the field of measuring and monitoring children’s well being. In the paper we focus on one specific change – the “new” role of children in measuring and monitoring their own well being – a role of active participants rather then of subjects for research. We then turn to present based on a sequence of arguments and findings what role children should carry in measuring and monitoring their well being. Followed by a presentation of five possible roles for children involvement in such studies and in regard to the specific roles existing knowledge from various studies and suggested directions for future research are presented. The danger of children’s involvement is such studies are then discussed followed by a presentation of what do children think on this all issue. Finally we conclude that the potential involved in children’s involvement is much greater then the hazards.     

Perceptions of Life Quality among the Korean Mass Public: Unraveling their Dynamics and Standards

South Korea is widely known as an Asian model of economic development and democratization. Yet until now, research has not shown whether the country’s successful transition to democracy and market capitalism has enabled ordinary citizens to experience a life of happiness and satisfaction in their private and public lives. To address this question, this study analyzes a 2002 Euromodule survey of the Korean electorate designed to appraise the quality of life as a whole and in its various important domains. Results of the analysis reveal that a substantial minority of South Koreans still leads undesirable lives full of unhappiness and dissatisfaction. Furthermore, among the socioeconomically deprived, more people report deteriorations rather than improvements in their living conditions over the past five years. On the basis of these findings, we conclude that the surging forces of democratization and marketization can hinder ordinary people from experiencing a better quality of life by motivating them to compare themselves with other people in better situations to a greater extent than they did under past circumstances.     

Empirical bayes estimation of demographic schedules for small areas

In this article, we analyze empirical Bayes (EB) methods for estimating small-area rate schedules. We develop EB methods that treat schedules as vectors and use adaptive neighborhoods to keep estimates appropriately local. This method estimates demographic rates for local subpopulations by borrowing strength not only from similar individuals elsewhere but also from other groups in the same area and from regularities in schedules across locations. EB is substantially better than standard methods when rates have strong spatial and age patterns. We illustrate this method with estimates of age-specific fertility schedules for over 3,800 Brazilian municipalities.     

Private Lives in Public Places: Loneliness of the Homeless

At the dawn of the 21st century, both loneliness and homelessness are more pervasive than we would possibly like to admit. In this study, the experience of loneliness of the homeless was compared to that of the general population. Two hundred and sixty six homeless and 595 men and women from the general population answered a 30 item yes/no questionnaire. The experience of loneliness is composed of the following five factors: emotional distress, social inadequacy and alienation, growth and discovery, interpersonal isolation, and self-alienation. The present results indicated that the experience of loneliness for the homeless is significantly different than that of the general population. Gender main effects were explored and discussed.     

Media Exposure and Health in Europe: Mediators and Moderators of Media Systems

This study examined media exposure as an explanatory factor for individual and cross-national differences in self-assessed general health. In studying media exposure, traditional media (television, radio, and newspapers) and contemporary media (internet) were separately considered. Aside from hypotheses about the relation between media exposure and general health, we also tested hypotheses regarding the mediating role of social isolation and mean world syndrome as well as the moderating role of different media systems across countries. Therefore, we used European Social Survey 2010, covering 25 European countries (n = 36,692). The results of our multilevel regression analyses indicated that exposure to television was negatively related to general health, whereas exposure to radio and newspapers were positively related to health. For contemporary media, findings indicated consistent positive relations between internet exposure and health across. Furthermore, limited support was found for the mediating role of social isolation and the mean world syndrome in the link between media exposure and health. Across media systems, findings for the relations between exposure to the various types of media and health proved to be robust.     

Mediating Effects Between Objective and Subjective Indicators of Urban Quality of Life: Testing Specific Models for Safety and Access

Enhancing the urban quality of life (QoL) is an explicit policy goal of many countries, yet it is rarely studied using models that relate objective measures of the urban environment to the subjective evaluations of residents. It thus often remains unclear how planning interventions in the urban environment may influence residents’ satisfaction with their living conditions. In particular, during periods of significant urban growth, such as those recently observed in Switzerland, which result in diverse, unwanted threats to the local QoL (e.g., loss of green spaces, traffic congestions, and fear of crime). This study uses data from a sample of 1,693 residents that participated in a postal survey about urban QoL. The responses were combined with objective attributes of residential conditions, using geographic information systems. Structural equation models were calibrated to examine the direct and indirect effects of important indicators of urban QoL, namely safety in public spaces and access to central urban facilities. The study sheds further light on the mediating effects between objective characteristics and subjective evaluations that influence the urban QoL. The results showed predominantly low correlations between objective characteristics and subjective evaluations of urban QoL, which confirmed the findings of the few previous studies on this topic. Surprisingly, this study also found a strong link between objective access and perceived accessibility. This relation was explained by the spatial scope of the study region and suggested that the scale discordance theory should be tested in future research. The findings implied that variations in objective measures do not reliably represent differences as evaluated by residents.     

Orphans in Africa: parental death,poverty, and school enrollment

We examine the impact of orphanhood on children's school enrollment in 10 sub-Saharan African countries. Although poorer children in Africa are less likely to attend school, the lower enrollment of orphans is not accounted for solely by their poverty. We find that orphans are less likely to be enrolled than are nonorphans with whom they live. Consistent with Hamilton's rule, the theory that the closeness of biological ties governs altruistic behavior, outcomes for orphans depend on the relatedness of orphans to their household heads. The lower enrollment of orphans is largely explained by the greater tendency of orphans to live with distant relatives or unrelated caregivers.