Search results

We estimate the parental investment response to the child endowment at birth, by analysing the effect of child birth weight on the hours worked by the mother two years after birth. Mother’s working hours soon after child birth are a measure of investments in their children as a decrease (increase) in hours raises (lowers) her time investment in the child. The child birth endowment is endogenously determined in part by unobserved traits of parents, such as investments during pregnancy. We adopt an instrumental variables estimation. Our instrumental variables are measures of the father’s health endowment at birth, which drive child birth weight through genetic transmission but does not affect directly the mother’s postnatal investments, conditional on maternal and paternal human capital and prenatal investments. We find an inverted U-shape relationship between mothers worked hours and birth weight, suggesting that both low and extremely high child birth weight are associated with child health issues for which mothers compensate by reducing their labour supply. The mother’s compensating response to child birth weight seems slightly attenuated for second and later born children. Our study contributes to the literature on the response of parental investments to child’s health at birth by proposing new and more credible instrumental variables for the child health endowment at birth and allowing for a heterogeneous response of the mother’s investment for first born and later born children.

Provides a comparison of the press coverage of the introduction of IVF in different contexts, giving a vantage point for examining the variability and the context‐dependence of the issue. Sheds some light on the cultural‐political‐social problems that the new technology entails. Contrasts the differences between Canada and Israel, showing that both countries endorse modern technology in the field of medidine: in both countries, IVF was imported about the same time and both used the US and Britain as a frame of reference and model rather than local developments. Shows the cultural differences of how each culture embraced the new technology.

This research studies the influence and mechanism of rearing cost and endowment insurance on family fertility desire from the micro perspective.

Through the construction of overlapping generations (OLG) model and on the basis of this research purpose, the research hypothesis proposed by the theoretical model is tested by using the data of China household tracking survey (CFPS).

(1) Endowment insurance has an inhibitory effect on family fertility desire. The marginal effects of participating in old-age insurance on total fertility desire and boy fertility desire are – 3.2% and – 3.6% respectively. (2) The cost of rearing has a significant negative impact on family fertility desire. (3) There is regional heterogeneity in the impact of endowment insurance and rearing cost on fertility desire. (4) There is no significant difference in the impact of endowment insurance on fertility desire between urban and rural areas.

This research tries to fill the gap existing in the international literature by analyzing the micro mechanism of the influence degree of upbringing cost on fertility desire by introducing the rearing cost and fertility rate into the OLG, providing a micro basis for relevant quantitative calculation.

This paper addresses revolutionary changes in the education, fertility and market work of U.S. families formed in the 1870s–1920s: Fertility fell from 5.3 to 2.6; the graduation rate of their children increased from 7% to 50%; and the fraction of adulthood wives devoted to market-oriented work increased from 7% to 23% (by one measure).

These trends are addressed within a unified framework to examine the ability of several proposed mechanisms to quantitatively replicate these changes. Based on careful calibration, the choices of successive generations of representative husband-and-wife households over the quantity and quality of their children, household production, and the extent of mother’s involvement in market-oriented production are simulated.

Rising wages, declining mortality, a declining gender wage gap, and increased efficiency and public provision of schooling cannot, individually or in combination, reduce fertility or increase stocks of human capital to levels seen in the data. The best fit of the model to the data also involves: (1) a decreased tendency among parents to view potential earnings of children as the property of parents and (2) rising consumption shares per dependent child.

Greater attention should be given the determinants of parental control of the work and earnings of children for this period.

One contribution is the gathering of information and strategies necessary to establish an initial baseline, and the time paths for parameters and targets for this period beset with data limitations. A second contribution is identifying the contributions of various mechanisms toward reaching those calibration targets.

At the end of the 1970s, the Chinese government enacted the one-child policy; now the one-child successively enters into the labor market and reaches the age for marriage and childbirth. The floating population group of China’s interior regions also experiences the heterogeneity changes. The purpose of this paper is to analyses the reasons for the difference of family migration between one-child and non-only child using the binary logit regression model – from the three aspects of individual characteristics, family endowment and institutional factors were investigated.

Family migration or individual migration of the floating population is the dichotomous dependent variable and therefore the binomial logistic regression analysis model is selected.

It is found that the tendency of one-child family migration is significantly higher than that of non-only child. The main reason is that the one-child has obvious advantages in terms of individual characteristics, family endowment and institutional factors.

The previous researches on family migration: first, the previous researches mainly analyzed the impact of the human capital and family income on the family migration from the perspective of economics and neglected the discussion on the family structure, life cycle, family level factors and Hukou’s limitation; second, most researches considered the migration as a whole. In fact, the migration population is no longer a highly homogeneous group and gradually become diversified.

The health consequences of child labor may take time to manifest themselves. This study examines whether children who began working at a young age experience increased incidence of illness or physical disability as adults. When child labor and schooling are treated as chosen without consideration of unobserved abilities or health endowments, child labor appears to have small adverse effects on a wide variety of health measures. Some adverse health consequences such as heart disease or hypertension seem unlikely to be caused by child labor. However, when we allow unobserved health and ability endowments to alter the age of labor market entry and years of schooling completed, the joint effects of child labor and schooling on health become larger while the less plausible health consequences lose significance. Results imply that delaying entry into child labor while increasing time in school significantly lowers the probability of early onset of physical ailments such as back problems, arthritis, or reduced strength or stamina. However, our methods are not able to distinguish between the health impacts of child labor from the impacts of reduced time in school.

In this chapter, I review recent evidence on the developmental origins of health inequality. I discuss the origins of the education-health gradient, the long-term costs caused by early life adversity, and how early life experiences affect the biology of the body. Additionally, I provide complementary evidence on enrichment interventions which can at least partially compensate for these gaps. I highlight emerging lines of scientific inquiry which are likely to have a significant impact on the field. I argue that, while the evidence that early life conditions have long-term effects is now uncontroversial, the literature needs to be expanded both in a theoretical and empirical direction. On the one hand, a model linking early life origins to ageing needs to be developed; on the other hand, a better understanding of the mechanisms – both biological and socioeconomic – is required, in order to design more effective interventions.

During the early 1970s, faced with the serious demographic situation, China began to fully implement the policy of family planning in urban and rural regions. Nowadays, the problems of pension and medical care for aged parents confronted by the first generation of the one‐child family have begun to gradually appear. Meanwhile, China's population and the family planning are also faced with some problems that are difficult to solve, including unbalanced fertility rate of urban and rural population, the gender imbalance, the difficulty of the risk diversification in a one‐child family, as well as the profound contradiction between the stability of the family planning policy and the drive of administrative measures. Therefore, it is necessary to establish the integrated‐scheduled life security system of the one‐child family in urban and rural areas, in order to overcome the problems and to promote the transformation of the family planning policy. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the life security system for China's one‐child families.

The life security system for the one‐child family proposed by this paper consists of three issues: the basic security based on the level of social security, the additional security of the policy insurance and the supplementary security of the commercial insurance. The paper begins with the history of the family planning policy in the first section and then go through some relevant articles regarding complementary measures such as maternity insurance, rural endowment insurance that only focused on one aspect of issues associated with the family planning. In section three, four typical problems are listed for the purpose of following discussion of corresponding solutions which are full of deficiency in section four. In part five, the integrated planning of the life security system for Chinese one‐child family is elaborated with risk and fund management. In the last part, we conclude that the family planning policy maintains stable, whereas measures to be taken are adjusted along with changeable new problems.

The policy insurance plays an increasingly important role in dealing with the life security of older people in one‐child families. It may be better to promote the kind of insurance.

The paper comprehensively discusses the life security system for Chinese families in compliance with the family planning policy.

Virtually all parents want their children to succeed academically. How to achieve this goal, though, is far from clear. Specifically, the temporal spacing between adjacent births has been shown to affect educational outcomes. While many of these studies have produced substantial and statistically significant results, these results have been relatively narrow in their application due to data limitations. Using Colorado birth certificates matched to schooling outcomes, we investigate the relationship between birth spacing and educational attainment. We instrument birth spacing with a previous pregnancy that did not result in a live birth. We find no overall effect of spacing on either the first or second children’s grade 3–10 test scores. Stratifying by the sexes of the children, we find that when the first child is a boy and the second a girl, an extra year of spacing increases the first child’s math, reading, and writing test scores by 0.07–0.08 SD, while there is no impact on the second child. This is the first study to do such an analysis using matched large-scale birth and elementary to high school administrative data, and to leverage a very large dataset to stratify our results by the sexes of the children.

The aim of this chapter is twofold. First, we want to show how children and minors are fundamental in any consideration of the major issues and goals of economics and politics, especially with regard to the relationship between democracy, well-being and economic development. Children's well-being is a valuable goal in itself, and given that minors represent the long-distant future, it is also a measure of the economic potential of each country and the world. Despite its inherent value and economic importance, children's well-being is an issue largely overlooked by politicians, and the main theme of this chapter is that this is inevitable because there is no political incentive for politicians to address it. As a consequence, the second aim of this chapter is to argue that granting children the right to vote would provide the best political incentive, as well as the missing link in modern democracies. We propose some reasons as to why extending the right to vote to minors represents the full achievement of universal suffrage for a mature society, rendering democracy absolute and improving its economic potential. Parents, who already represent their children's interests in everyday decisions, should naturally be entitled to represent them in the polling booth as well, qualifying their participation in the functioning of democracy through their role as parents. We argue that this change in electoral rules would force politicians to consider children, pushing minors’ well-being to the top of all political parties’ agendas and prompting the market and politics to ensure a better allocation of resources between generations.