Grandparents' Education and Infant Health: Pathways Across Generations

Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing survey linked to respondents' medical records (N = 2,870), this study examines the association between grandparents' education and birth outcomes and explores potential pathways underlying this relationship. Results show that having a grandfather with less than a high school education was associated with a 93 gram reduction in birth weight, a 59% increase in the odds of low birth weight, and a 136% increase in the odds of a neonatal health condition when compared with having a grandfather with a high school education or more. These associations were partially accounted for by mother's educational attainment and marital status as well as by prenatal history of depression, hypertension, and prenatal health behaviors, depending on the specific outcome. The findings from this study call for heightened attention to the multigenerational influences of educational attainment for infant health.     

Life Shocks and Crime: A Test of the “Turning Point” Hypothesis

Other researchers have posited that important events in men's lives-such as employment, marriage, and parenthood-strengthen their social ties and lead them to refrain from crime. A challenge in empirically testing this hypothesis has been the issue of self-selection into life transitions. This study contributes to this literature by estimating the effects of an exogenous life shock on crime. We use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, augmented with information from hospital medical records, to estimate the effects of the birth of a child with a severe health problem on the likelihood that the infant's father engages in illegal activities. We conduct a number of auxiliary analyses to examine exogeneity assumptions. We find that having an infant born with a severe health condition increases the likelihood that the father is convicted of a crime in the three-year period following the birth of the child, and at least part of the effect appears to operate through work and changes in parental relationships. These results provide evidence that life events can cause crime and, as such, support the "turning point" hypothesis.     

Estimation of a Conditional Copula and Association Measures

Abstarct. This paper is concerned with studying the dependence structure between two random variables Y ₁ and Y ₂ conditionally upon a covariate X. The dependence structure is modelled via a copula function, which depends on the given value of the covariate in a general way. Gijbels et al. (Comput. Statist. Data Anal., 55, 2011, 1919) suggested two non‐parametric estimators of the ‘conditional’ copula and investigated their numerical performances. In this paper we establish the asymptotic properties of the proposed estimators as well as conditional association measures derived from them. Practical recommendations for their use are then discussed.     

Effects of child health on parents’ relationship status

We used data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to estimate the effect of a child's poor health on the presence of thefather. We investigated whether parents lived in the same household 12-18 months after the child's birth and whether their relationships changed along a continuum (married, cohabiting, romantically involved, friends, or not involved) during the same period. We found that within this short period, having a child with poor health decreased the probability that the parents lived together by 10 percentage points. It also increased the probability that their relationship status moved in the direction of less involvement by 6 percentage points. These results indicate that children's health and family structure jointly shape children's long-term health and economic trajectories.     

The study of commission rate problem in real-time bidding

This paper studies the commission rate in real-time bidding based on the generalized first-price auction mechanism. Firstly, the equilibrium bidding strategies are provided when there are fixed commission rate and the linear commission rate, which proves that if the there is no reserve price, the expected payment of DSP is not related to the rate of commission. The commission rate affects the equilibrium bidding strategies only. Secondly, this paper shows that if there are the reserve price and the commission, the payment of DSP is increasing on the commission rate. That is, if there is reserve price, the DSP cannot control the increasing of the expected payment by adjusting the equilibrium bidding strategy, when the commission rate increases. Finally, provided that the reserve price and commission rate are exogenous respectively, this paper draws to the conclusion that the conditions of optimal commission rate and the optimal reserve price must be satisfied.     

Sieve Empirical Likelihood and Extensions of the Generalized Least Squares

The empirical likelihood cannot be used directly sometimes when an infinite dimensional parameter of interest is involved. To overcome this difficulty, the sieve empirical likelihoods are introduced in this paper. Based on the sieve empirical likelihoods, a unified procedure is developed for estimation of constrained parametric or non-parametric regression models with unspecified error distributions. It shows some interesting connections with certain extensions of the generalized least squares approach. A general asymptotic theory is provided. In the parametric regression setting it is shown that under certain regularity conditions the proposed estimators are asymptotically efficient even if the restriction functions are discontinuous. In the non-parametric regression setting the convergence rate of the maximum estimator based on the sieve empirical likelihood is given. In both settings, it is shown that the estimator is adaptive for the inhomogeneity of conditional error distributions with respect to predictor, especially for heteroscedasticity.     

Contemporaneous Versus Retrospective Reports of Cohabitation in the Fragile Families Survey

We compare contemporaneous and retrospective reports of cohabitation among unmarried mothers in the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing survey (N =2,524). We find that (a) many mothers revise their reports of whether they cohabited at the time of the birth of their child and (b) revisions in reports are systematically related to individuals’ characteristics and the quality and trajectory of parents’ relationships. These results have important implications for analyses of determinants and consequences of family structure using these data and, potentially, any retrospective data on relationships and family structure.