Financially Overextended: College Attendance as a Contributor to Foreclosures During the Great Recession
AbstractAlthough subprime mortgage lending and unemployment were largely responsible for the wave of foreclosures during the Great Recession, additional sources of financial risk may have exacerbated the crisis. We hypothesize that many parents sending children to college were financially overextended and vulnerable to foreclosure as the economy contracted. With commuting zone panel data from 2006 to 2011, we show that increasing rates of college attendance across the income distribution in one year predict a foreclosure rate increase in subsequent years, net of fixed characteristics and changes in employment, refinance de...
Source: Demography - August 6, 2018 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
How Has the Lower Boundary of Human Mortality Evolved, and Has It Already Stopped Decreasing?
AbstractIn contrast to the upper boundary of mortality, the lower boundary has so far largely been neglected. Based on the three key features —location, sex-specific difference, and level—I analyze past and present trends in the lower boundary of human mortality. The analysis is based on cohort mortality data for 38 countries, covering all the cohorts born between 1900 and 1993. Minimum mortality is analyzed using observed as well as smoothed estimates. The results show that the ages at which minimum mortality is reached have shifted to lower ages. Although the differences have become almost negligible over time, males...
Source: Demography - August 3, 2018 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
Gender Bias in Parental Attitude: An Experimental Approach
AbstractParental bias toward children of a particular gender has been widely observed in many societies. Such bias could be due to pure gender preference or differences in earning opportunities and concern for old-age support. We conduct a high-stakes allocation task (subjects allocate the equivalent of one day ’s wages between male and female school-aged students) in rural Bangladesh to examine parental attitudes toward male and female children. Parents, either jointly or individually, allocated freely or restricted endowments for the benefit of anonymous girls or boys at a nearby school. We examine whe ther there is an...
Source: Demography - August 3, 2018 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
How Has the Lower Boundary of Human Mortality Evolved, and Has It Already Stopped Decreasing?
AbstractIn contrast to the upper boundary of mortality, the lower boundary has so far largely been neglected. Based on the three key features —location, sex-specific difference, and level—I analyze past and present trends in the lower boundary of human mortality. The analysis is based on cohort mortality data for 38 countries, covering all the cohorts born between 1900 and 1993. Minimum mortality is analyzed using observed as well as smoothed estimates. The results show that the ages at which minimum mortality is reached have shifted to lower ages. Although the differences have become almost negligible over time, males...
Source: Demography - August 3, 2018 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
Gender Bias in Parental Attitude: An Experimental Approach
AbstractParental bias toward children of a particular gender has been widely observed in many societies. Such bias could be due to pure gender preference or differences in earning opportunities and concern for old-age support. We conduct a high-stakes allocation task (subjects allocate the equivalent of one day ’s wages between male and female school-aged students) in rural Bangladesh to examine parental attitudes toward male and female children. Parents, either jointly or individually, allocated freely or restricted endowments for the benefit of anonymous girls or boys at a nearby school. We examine whe ther there is an...
Source: Demography - August 3, 2018 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
Correction to: Interior Immigration Enforcement and Political Participation of U.S. Citizens in Mixed-Status Households
AbstractRuggles, S., Genadek, K., Goeken, R., Grover, J.,& and Sobek, M. (2017).Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 7.0 [Data set]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. https://doi.org/10.18128/D010.V7.0. (Source: Demography)
Source: Demography - August 1, 2018 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
Father Absence and Accelerated Reproductive Development in Non-Hispanic White Women in the United States
AbstractGirls who experience father absence in childhood also experience accelerated reproductive development in comparison with peers with present fathers. One hypothesis advanced to explain this empirical pattern is genetic confounding, wherein gene-environment correlation (rGE) causes a spurious relationship between father absence and reproductive timing. We test this hypothesis by constructing polygenic scores for age at menarche and first birth using recently available genome-wide association study results and molecular genetic data on a sample of non-Hispanic white females from the National Longitudinal Study of Adol...
Source: Demography - July 5, 2018 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
Bayesian Estimation of Age-Specific Mortality and Life Expectancy for Small Areas With Defective Vital Records
AbstractHigh sampling variability complicates estimation of demographic rates in small areas. In addition, many countries have imperfect vital registration systems, with coverage quality that varies significantly between regions. We develop a Bayesian regression model for small-area mortality schedules that simultaneously addresses the problems of small local samples and underreporting of deaths. We combine a relational model for mortality schedules with probabilistic prior information on death registration coverage derived from demographic estimation techniques, such as Death Distribution Methods, and from field audits by...
Source: Demography - July 5, 2018 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
Places of Persistence: Slavery and the Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States
AbstractIntergenerational mobility has remained stable over recent decades in the United States but varies sharply across the country. In this article, I document that areas with more prevalent slavery by the outbreak of the Civil War exhibit substantially less upward mobility today. I find a negative link between prior slavery and contemporary mobility within states, when controlling for a wide range of historical and contemporary factors including income and inequality, focusing on the historical slave states, using a variety of mobility measures, and when exploiting geographical differences in the suitability for cultiv...
Source: Demography - July 3, 2018 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
Maybe Next Month? Temperature Shocks and Dynamic Adjustments in Birth Rates
AbstractWe estimate the effects of temperature shocks on birth rates in the United States between 1931 and 2010. We find that days with a mean temperature above 80 °F cause a large decline in birth rates 8 to 10 months later. Unlike prior studies, we demonstrate that the initial decline is followed by a partial rebound in births over the next few months, implying that populations mitigate some of the fertility cost by shifting conception month. This shift hel ps explain the observed peak in late-summer births in the United States. We also present new evidence that hot weather most likely harms fertility via reproductive h...
Source: Demography - July 2, 2018 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
Sampling Weights for Analyses of Couple Data: Example of the Demographic and Health Surveys
We present a method of estimating appropriate weights for couples that extends methods currently used in the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) for individual weights. To see how results vary, we analyze 1912 estimates (means; proportions; linear regression; and simple and multinomial logistic regression coefficients, and their standard errors) with couple data in each of 11 DHS surveys in which the couple weight could be derived. We used two measures of bias: absolute percentage difference from the value estimated with the couple weight and ratio of the absolute difference to the standard error using the couple weight. ...
Source: Demography - July 2, 2018 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
The Impact of the Affordable Care Act Young Adult Provision on Childbearing: Evidence From Tax Data
AbstractWe use panel U.S. tax data spanning 2008 –2013 to study the impact of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) young adult provision on an important demographic outcome: childbearing. The impact is theoretically ambiguous: gaining insurance may increase access to contraceptive services while also reducing the out-of-pocket costs of childbirth. Beca use employer-reported U.S. Wage and Tax Statements (W-2 forms) record access to employer-provided benefits, we can examine the impact of the coverage expansion by focusing on young adults whose parents have access to benefits. We compare those who are slightly younger than the ag...
Source: Demography - July 2, 2018 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
The Effects of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals on the Educational Outcomes of Undocumented Students
AbstractDeferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) is the first large-scale immigration policy to affect undocumented immigrants in the United States in decades and offers eligible undocumented youth temporary relief from deportation as well as renewable work permits. Although DACA has improved the economic conditions and mental health of undocumented immigrants, we do not know how DACA improves the social mobility of undocumented immigrants through its effect on educational attainment. We use administrative data on students attending a large public university to estimate the effect of DACA on undocumented students ’ ...
Source: Demography - June 25, 2018 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
Imputation Match Bias in Immigrant Wage Convergence
AbstractAlthough immigrants to the United States earn less at entry than their native-born counterparts, an extensive literature has found that immigrants have faster earnings growth that results in rapid convergence to native-born earnings. However, recent evidence based on U.S. Census data indicates a slowdown in the rate of earnings assimilation. We find that the pace of immigrant wage convergence based on recent data may be understated in the literature as a result of the method used by the census to impute missing information on earnings, which does not use immigration status as a match characteristic. Because both th...
Source: Demography - June 25, 2018 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
