Does Parents ’ Union Instability Disrupt Intergenerational Advantage? An Analysis of Sub-Saharan Africa
AbstractThe long arm of childhood, with its wide-ranging influence on individuals ’ life chances, highlights the importance of understanding the determinants of health in early life. Research has established that parents’ education is a major determinant of childhood health, but children across the globe increasingly experience their parents’ divorce and subsequent remarria ge, raising questions of whether union instability alters these intergenerational processes. Does divorce and remarriage interfere with parents’ education benefiting their young children’s health? I explore this question in sub-Saharan Africa,...
Source: Demography - February 6, 2020 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
The Impact of Parental Involvement Laws on the Abortion Rate of Minors
AbstractIn this article, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of the effect of parental involvement (PI) laws on the incidence of abortions to minors in the United States. We contribute to the extant literature in several ways. First, we explore differences in estimates of the effect of PI laws across time that may result from changes in contraception, the composition of pregnant minors, abortion access in nearby states, and differences in how these laws are enforced. We find that PI laws enacted before the mid-1990s are associated with a 15% to 20% reduction in abortions to minors, but PI laws enacted after this time are n...
Source: Demography - February 5, 2020 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
Parents ’ Marital Quality and Children’s Transition to Adulthood
AbstractUnique longitudinal measures from Nepal allow us to link both mothers ’ and fathers’ reports of their marital relationships with a subsequent long-term record of their children’s behaviors. We focus on children’s educational attainment and marriage timing because these two dimensions of the transition to adulthood have wide-ranging, long-lasting consequences. We find that children whose parents report strong marital affection and less spousal conflict attain higher levels of education and marry later than children whose parents do not. Furthermore, these findings are independent of each other and of multipl...
Source: Demography - January 30, 2020 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
Worth the Weight? Recent Trends in Obstetric Practices, Gestational Age, and Birth Weight in the United States
AbstractBirth weight in the United States declined substantially during the 1990s and 2000s. We suggest that the declines were likely due to shifts in gestational age resulting from changes in obstetric practices. Using restricted National Vital Statistics System data linked birth/infant death data for 1990 –2013, we analyze trends in obstetric practices, gestational age distributions, and birth weights among first-birth singletons born to U.S. non-Hispanic White, non-Hispanic Black, and Latina women. We use life table techniques to analyze the joint probabilities of gestational age-specific birth an d gestational age-sp...
Source: Demography - January 28, 2020 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
Labor Force Participation Over the Life Course: The Long-Term Effects of Employment Trajectories on Wages and the Gendered Payoff to Employment
AbstractIn this article, we consider how individuals ’ long-term employment trajectories relate to wage inequality and the gender wage gap in the United States. Using more than 30 years of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 sample, we identify six employment trajectories for individuals from ages 22 to 50. We find that women ac ross racial/ethnic groups and Black men are more likely than White and Hispanic men to have nonsteady employment trajectories and lower levels of employment throughout their lives, and individuals who have experienced poverty also have heightened risks of intermittent employm...
Source: Demography - January 28, 2020 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
Population Pyramids Yield Accurate Estimates of Total Fertility Rates
AbstractThe primary fertility index for a population, the total fertility rate (TFR), cannot be calculated for many areas and periods because it requires disaggregation of births by mother ’s age. Here we discuss a flexible framework for estimating TFR using inputs as minimal as a population pyramid. We develop five variants, each with increasing complexity and data requirements. We test accuracy across a diverse set of data sources that comprise more than 2,400 fertility schedules with known TFR values, including the Human Fertility Database, Demographic and Health Surveys, U.S. counties, and nonhuman species. We show t...
Source: Demography - January 27, 2020 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
The Marital Implications of Bereavement: Child Death and Intimate Partner Violence in West and Central Africa
AbstractIn high-mortality contexts, research examining the effects of child mortality has focused almost exclusively on couples ’ fertility responses while overlooking other potential family consequences. Using nationally representative survey data from 13 West and Central African countries, we estimate multilevel discrete-time hazard models to determine how women’s risk of intimate partner violence (IPV) varies with the death of children. We assess heterogeneity in this association across two surrounding circumstances: children’s age at death and regional prevalence of child bereavement. Findings indicate that the r...
Source: Demography - January 26, 2020 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
Crime and Inequality in Academic Achievement Across School Districts in the United States
This study investigates the effect of violent crime on school district –level achievement in English language arts (ELA) and mathematics. The research design exploits variation in achievement and violent crime across 813 school districts in the United States and seven birth cohorts of children born between 1996 and 2002. The identification strategy leverages exogenou s shocks to crime rates arising from the availability of federal funds to hire police officers in the local police departments where the school districts operate. Results show that children who entered the school system when the violent crime rate in their s...
Source: Demography - January 26, 2020 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
Pathways to Low Fertility: 50 Years of Limitation, Curtailment, and Postponement of Childbearing
This study applies survival analysis to the birth histories from 317 national surveys to model pathways to low fertility in 83 less-developed countries between 1965 and 2014. It presents period measures of parity progression, the length of birth intervals and total fertility that have been standardized fully for age, parity, and interval duration. It also examines parity-specific trends in the proportion of women who want no more children. Outside sub-Saharan Africa, fertility transition was dominated by parity-specific family size limitation. As the transition progressed, women also began to postpone their next birth for ...
Source: Demography - January 21, 2020 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
Does Starting Universal Childcare Earlier Influence Children ’s Skill Development?
AbstractAs many developed countries enact policies that allow children to begin universal childcare earlier, understanding how starting universal childcare earlier affects children ’s cognitive and noncognitive skills is an important policy question. We provide comprehensive evidence on the multidimensional short- and longer-run effects of starting universal childcare earlier using a fuzzy discontinuity in the age at starting childcare in Germany. Combining rich survey and a dministrative data, we follow one cohort from age 6 to 15 and examine standardized cognitive test scores, noncognitive skill measures, and school tr...
Source: Demography - January 14, 2020 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
Marriage Decline in Korea: Changing Composition of the Domestic Marriage Market and Growth in International Marriage
AbstractExplanations for the substantial decline in rates of marriage in East Asian countries often emphasize the role of rapid educational expansion for women in reducing the desirability of marriages characterized by a strong gender-based division of labor. Focusing on South Korea, we consider a very different scenario in which changing educational composition of the marriage market reduces the demographic feasibility of such marriages. Analyses of 1% microsamples of the 1990 and 2010 Korean censuses show that changes in the availability of potential spouses accounted for part of the decline in marriage rates over a peri...
Source: Demography - January 8, 2020 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
Two Decades of Same-Sex Marriage in Sweden: A Demographic Account of Developments in Marriage, Childbearing, and Divorce
In this study, we provide demographic insight into the still relatively new family form of same-sex marriage. We focus on period trends in same-sex marriage formation and divorce during 1995 –2012 in Sweden and the role of childbearing in same-sex unions. The period begins with the introduction of registered partnership for same-sex couples and also covers the introduction of formal same-sex marriage in 2009. We use register data for the complete population of Sweden to contrast patte rns in male and female same-sex marriage formation and divorce. We show that female same-sex union formation increased rapidly over the pe...
Source: Demography - January 8, 2020 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
Family, Firms, and Fertility: A Study of Social Interaction Effects
AbstractResearch has indicated that fertility spreads through social networks and attributed this phenomenon to social interaction effects. It remains unclear, however, whether the findings of previous studies reflect the direct influence of network partners or contextual and selection factors, such as shared environment and common background characteristics. The present study uses instrumental variables to improve the identification of social interaction effects on fertility. Using data from the System of social statistical data sets (SSD) of Statistics Netherlands, we identify two networks —the network of colleagues at...
Source: Demography - January 5, 2020 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
Relative Sizes of Age Cohorts and Labor Force Participation of Older Workers
AbstractWe study the effects of the size of older cohorts on labor force participation and wages of older workers in the United States. We use panel data on states, treating the age structure of the population as endogenous, owing to migration. When older cohorts (50 –59 or 60–69) are large relative to a young cohort (aged 16–24), the evidence fits the relative supply hypothesis. However, when older cohorts are large relative to 25- to 49-year-olds, the evidence points to a relative demand shift. Thus, we need a more nuanced view than simply whether the ol der cohort is large relative to the population: the cohort th...
Source: Demography - December 15, 2019 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
Midlife Work and Women ’s Long-Term Health and Mortality
AbstractAlthough paid work is a well-established predictor of health, several gaps in our knowledge about the relationship between adult work patterns and later health and mortality remain, including whether these benefits persist over long periods and whether they are dependent on subjective experiences with work. We draw on more than three decades of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Mature Women to assess how labor force participation over a period of 20 years during midlife is related to mental and physical health and mortality over the following 16 –25 years. We find that consistent work earlier in life ...
Source: Demography - December 10, 2019 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
