This paper studies the distribution of resources within families with migrant member abroad. We derive a complete collective demand system with individual Engel effects for male and female adults and children, and the respective share of resources. The focus is on migrant-sending families in Albania, where gender and inter-generational inequalities are relevant social issues. The results show that the female share of resources is substantially lower with respect to an equal distribution and do not benefit from father’s migration. Children have a larger share of resources and benefit from their fathers migration, when women maintain control over family decisions and when the proportion of female children is larger (at the detriment of women).

This study examines the postmarriage bargaining power of women—specifically, their decision-making power with regard to fertility—vis-à-vis imbalances in matching in the marriage market. Applying a multinomial logit model to data on rural Bangladesh for 1998/99, the study gauges women's relative empowerment: (i) at the time of marriage (measured by the bride price as a share of total marriage payments) and (ii) postmarriage (measured by women's use of the contraceptive pill). The empirical findings reveal that a higher bride price (as a share of total household marriage payments) has three main outcomes: it increases the predicted probability of women (i) using the contraceptive pill, (ii) spacing births further apart, and (iii) choosing to have fewer children.

Gary Becker’s work on “human capital” started around 1960. It was motivated by the rising interest in economic growth at the time. As stated in the introduction to the first edition of his book, Human Capital, “The origin of this study can be traced to the finding that a substantial growth in incomes in the US remains after the growth of physical capital and labor has been accounted for”. This unexplained residual suggested to several researchers that unmeasured features of the quality of the labor force must also be brought into consideration. While econometricians such as Edward Denison, Dale Jorgenson, and Zvi Griliches turned to seek better data that would reduce the scope of the unexplained residual, Becker constructed a detailed and original theory regarding the possible effects of a major unobserved and all inclusive factor, termed, human capital, would have on observed outcomes such as wages and education and their variation over time and among individual types. Most of the theoretical results reported in the three editions of Human Capital, 1964, 1975, and 1995 are already anticipated in a single early paper that was published in the Journal of Political Economy in 1962.

This paper argues that the conventional strategy of identifying a cultural effect using variation across countries of origin may be biased because the assumption that all immigrants make their choices in an identical environment in the host country is unlikely to hold true, even when controlling for individual characteristics. We discuss different mechanisms behind the bias and propose to eliminate it by exploiting only the variation within countries of origin. In our application (fertility of immigrants in Germany), the cultural effect survives this more demanding specification; however, the estimated coefficient is smaller compared to estimations that rely on cross-country variation for identification. We also show that the cultural influence is considerably smaller in the second generation of immigrants.

According to the conventional theory of the demographic transition, mortality decline has represented the major trigger of fertility decline and sustained economic development. In Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), the HIV/AIDS epidemic has had a devastating impact on mortality, dramatically reversing the long-term positive trend in life expectancies in high HIV-prevalence countries. Moreover, SSA is experiencing a delayed and slower fertility transition compared to other world regions and there is growing empirical evidence highlighting the potential for a paralysis, or even a reversal, of the fertility transition in countries with severe HIV epidemics. This work builds on a unified growth theory-like general equilibrium model combined with HIV spread, where mortality endogenously feeds back into fertility and education decisions. The model supports the evidence of an HIV-triggered fertility reversal in SSA via the fall in education and human capital investments due to increased adult mortality, which eventually breaks the switch from quantity to quality of children. Fertility reversal is predicted to be more likely to occur in countries experiencing severe HIV epidemics, and its effects may persist even under successful scenarios of HIV control. These results suggest that the alarming possibility of a paralysis in the fertility transition, which so far has aroused little concern among international organizations, e.g., in the last round of UN population projections, should be seriously considered with a view to prioritizing policy interventions.

A variety of states in the United States have adopted the “homemaking provision” in their divorce laws since the 1980s. The provision requires judges to recognize homemakers’ contribution to their marriages in dividing marital properties at divorce. I model the marital decisions of couples as a sequential game, in which the potential wife’s decision in whether to marry and specialize in home production depends on whether she is legally protected by the homemaking provision, as the law would reinforce her post-divorce property rights and therefore increase her bargaining power within the marriage. I use the variation in the timing of the passage of the homemaking provision to identify its effect on marriage. I find that the provision substantially increases marriages using both state- and individual-level data.

The headline demographics of sub-Saharan Africa appear to be reason for concern. Looking back, since Independence in the 1960s, the region has been the major exception to the global demographic trend of rising height: In some countries, average height has even been declining [eLife (2016)]. Looking forward, between now and 2050, the population is set to grow more rapidly than that of any other region. But the demographic transition that is typically of most concern to African governments is not about the size or stature of overall population, it is urbanization. Politicians fear the consequences of a restive urban youth: an Arab Spring repeated south of the Sahara. Many would like to slow the pace of urbanization.

Developing countries often lack an adequate social security system, and elderly parents rely heavily on their children for support. Aging populations and low-fertility rates are an emerging trend in developing countries. In this paper, we examine the effects of sibship size on individuals' internal migration decisions in China. We find that the number of siblings has a positive effect on individual migration decisions, but this effect is non-linear and marginally increasing. Second, we find that having brothers has a more significant effect on migration decisions than having sisters. Finally, although of different magnitudes, the effects are persistent across genders, Hukou status, and education levels.

Gary Becker's theories of marriage were mentioned as one of the reasons why he was awarded the Nobel prize in economics in 1992 and were emphasized by Becker: his first article on the family published in a major journal (Becker 1973) is a theory of marriage and the chapters on marriage in his influential Treatise on the Family (Becker 1981, 1991) come first. Becker's theoretical models of marriage all view marriages as small non-profit firms engaged in household production, thereby featuring one of the basic tenets of the New Home Economics that Becker pioneered with Jacob Mincer while both were at Columbia University in the 1960s (see Becker 1960, 1965; Mincer 1962, 1963).

Having accurate poverty statistics is of primary importance for researchers and policy-makers. Based on original data on Burundi, we investigate the sensitivity of poverty headcount calculations to considering individual- instead of household-level consumption. Relying on a survey module which provides information on the share of expenses allocated to each member of the households, we calculate poverty statutes on an individual basis. Exploiting these direct measures to compute poverty headcounts allows us to put forward the discrepancy between individual- and household-level poverty computations. We identify “hidden poor,” i.e. poor individuals living in non-poor households, and show that they are predominantly children. We finally discuss potential mechanisms that could drive the results, and emphasize the importance of improving data collection devices for poverty-related policy making.

Inclusion of additional dimensions to population projections can lead to an improvement in the overall quality of the projections and to an enhanced analytical potential of derived projections such as literacy skills and labor force participation. This paper describes the modeling of educational attainment of a microsimulation projection model of the European Union countries. Using ordered logistic regressions on five waves of the European Social Survey, we estimate the impact of mother's education and other sociocultural characteristics on educational attainment and implement them into the microsimulation model. Results of the different projection scenarios are contrasted to understand how the education of the mother and sociocultural variables may affect projection outcomes. We show that a change in the impact of mother's education on children's educational attainment may have a big effect on future trends. Moreover, the proposed approach yields more consistent population projection outputs for specific subpopulations.

The effects on agents’ welfare of two different policies dealing with undocumented immigrants, amnesties and deportations, are assessed. I develop a two-period overlapping generations model which accounts for the ex-ante production by undocumented workers and their impact on the government budget. Additional channels, such as the discrimination on the labor market and a different productivity of regularized workers are discussed. The impact of a migration policy depends on the wage effects of the legalized/deported workers and their net fiscal contribution. The calibration of the model for the United States in 2014 allows to disentangle the channels at work. Overall, the impact of the two policies on natives’ welfare is limited (between −0.1% and +0.15%). Retired agents benefit from an amnesty and are harmed by a deportation. The effect on workers is ambiguous and depends on the wage and fiscal effects in addition to the change in the returns on savings.

We analyze the interaction of black–white race with physical and socioeconomic characteristics in the US marriage market, using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We estimate who inter-racially marries whom along anthropometric and socioeconomic characteristics dimensions. The black women who inter-marry are the thinner and more educated in their group; instead, white women are the fatter and less educated; black or white men who inter-marry are poorer and thinner. While women in “mixed” couples find a spouse who is poorer but thinner than if they intra-married, black men match with a white woman who is more educated than if they intra-married, and a white man finds a thinner spouse in a black woman. Our general findings are consistent with the “social status exchange” hypothesis, but the finding that black men who marry white women tend to be poorer than black men who marry black women is not.

Reproductive externalities are important for fertility behavior in Kenya. We identify from anthropology structural forms of social interaction operating across individuals belonging to different ethnic and religious groups on the number of children ever born. We use the 1998 Demographic and Health Survey, combined with primary meteorological data on Kenya, and GMM methods, to show that social interaction effects by ethnicity are important over and above an individual's characteristics such as their religion to explain variations in fertility. Our findings have implications for policy debates in Kenya and in other developing countries about ethnic, religious, and other differences in fertility behavior.

In this paper, we investigate the long-term effects of climate change on the mobility of working-age people. We use a world economy model that covers almost all the countries around the world, and distinguishes between rural and urban regions as well as between flooded and unflooded areas. The model is calibrated to match international and internal mobility data by education level for the last 30 years, and is then simulated under climate change variants. We endogenize the size, dyadic, and skill structure of climate migration. When considering moderate climate scenarios, we predict mobility responses in the range of 70–108 million workers over the course of the twenty-first century. Most of these movements are local or inter-regional. South–South international migration responses are smaller, while the South–North migration response is of the “brain drain” type and induces a permanent increase in the number of foreigners in OECD countries in the range of 6–9% only. Changes in the sea level mainly translate into forced local movements. By contrast, inter-regional and international movements are sensitive to temperature-related changes in productivity. Lastly, we show that relaxing international migration restrictions may exacerbate the poverty effect of climate change at origin if policymakers are unable to select/screen individuals in extreme poverty.

Malaria afflicts mankind since thousands of years and still imposes serious health impediments and considerable mortality on the affected populations. Empirical investigations of the role of malaria for economic development at the country level deliver mixed findings, however. We study the role of long-term malaria exposure on development today using disaggregate within-country variation for the whole of Africa with 1 × 1 degree cells as units of observation. Local development is measured by light density at night. Based on insights from epidemiology, which documents that genetic and acquired immunities reduce Malaria risk for adults in holoendemic areas, the effect is hypothesized to be nonlinear, with a peak for intermediate rather than high exposure to the pathogen. The empirical findings support this hypothesis. The results also suggest the existence of a significant moderating effect of genetic immunities measured by the prevalence of the sickle cell trait in the population.

We provide, for the first time, a detailed and comprehensive overview of the demography of more than 50,000 towns, villages, and manors in 1871 Prussia. We study religion, literacy, fertility, and group segregation by location type (town, village, and manor). We find that Jews live predominantly in towns. Villages and manors are substantially segregated by denomination, whereas towns are less segregated. Yet, we find relatively lower levels of segregation by literacy. Regression analyses with county-fixed effects show that a larger share of Protestants is associated with higher literacy rates across all location types. A larger share of Jews relative to Catholics is not significantly associated with higher literacy in towns, but it is in villages and manors. Finally, a larger share of Jews is associated with lower fertility in towns, which is not explained by differences in literacy.

India's sex ratio at birth (SRB) has become increasingly masculine, coinciding with a declining total fertility rate. Couples often resort to sex-selective abortion or even infanticide to ensure the birth of a son. We use household-level data from all four waves of India's National Family Health Survey (NFHS) to investigate the effect of India's demographic transition on the SRB. Mixed-effects logit regression analysis demonstrates that since the early 1990s, the probability of a third-order birth being male is decreasing in the number of sons previously born, while for second-order births, this effect does not become apparent until the 2000s. Accounting for geographic heterogeneity in the fertility transition, we find additional heterogeneity in son preference and sex selection at the village/neighborhood level. This heterogeneity has strengthened over time at both second- and third-order births and in more and less gender skewed regions of the country, suggesting potential convergence in sex ratios across India. By incorporating the most recent 2015–16 round of the NFHS, we demonstrate that previously documented trends in sex selection continue, and additionally that sex selection is increasingly occurring at lower parities as the desire for a smaller family combines with the traditional preference for sons.

How well do parents’ education, earnings, income, and wealth predict the same outcomes for their children? Scientists have been trying to answer this question for a long time. Francis Galton (1822–1911) was the first to apply statistical methods to tackle this question. Centuries earlier, the great Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) famously observed that the prestige lasted at best four generations in one lineage.

Female family headship has strong implications for endemic poverty in the United States. Consequently, it is imperative to explore the chief factors that contribute to this problem. Departing from prior literature that places significant weight on welfare-incentive effects, our study highlights the role of male marriageability in explaining the prevalence of never-married female family headship for blacks and whites. Specifically, we examine racial differences in the effect of male marriageability on never-married female headship from 1980 to 2010. By exploiting data from IPUMS-USA (N = 4,958,722) and exogenous variation from state-level sentencing reforms, the study finds that the decline in the relative supply of marriageable males significantly increases the incidence of never-married female family headship for blacks but not for whites.