Using novel microdata, we explore lifecycle consumption in Sub-Saharan Africa. We find that households' ability to smooth consumption over the lifecycle is large, particularly, in rural areas. Consumption in old age is sustained by shifting to self-farmed staple food, as opposed to traditional savings mechanisms or food gifts. This smoothing strategy indicates two important costs. The first cost is a loss of human capital as children seem to be diverted away from school and into producing self-farmed food. Second, a diet largely concentrated in staple food (e.g., maize in Malawi) in old age results in a loss of nutritional quality for households headed by the elderly.

This paper studies the impact of immigration on native labor market outcomes in South Korea. We exploit the variation in immigration flows in an education-experience cell and find that, on average, immigration has no harmful effect on the wages or employment of native workers. However, there is a great heterogeneity of wage effects across education groups: high school dropouts suffer from the adverse effects, whereas the effects for college graduates are positive. We find the potential explanation for these differential effects in the suggestive evidence on the degree of substitution. Specifically, we examine the similarity of occupational distribution between natives and immigrants and assimilation patterns for immigrants.

We construct and parameterize an overlapping generations model for an open economy with individuals who differ in innate ability. Key endogenous variables are hours worked, investment in human and physical capital, and per capita growth. The model replicates important data in Belgium since 1960 remarkably well. Simulating it, we observe that behavioral adjustments by households and firms contribute to reverse the negative arithmetical effect of future demographic change on per capita growth. Individuals work and study more. However, with unchanged policies, there remains a net negative effect on annual per capita growth of almost 0.3%-points on average in the next 25 years. This is mainly due to adverse consequences of reduced fertility and a declining working-age population on (the return to) physical capital investment. Model projections also point to rising income inequality induced by demographic change. Differences in the capacity of individuals to respond to increasing life expectancy by investing in education, and by saving, are key.

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.

Measuring direct and indirect effects of extending health insurance coverage in developing countries is a key issue for health system development and for attaining universal health coverage. This paper investigates the role played by health insurance in the relationship between parental morbidity and child work decisions. We use a propensity score matching technique combined with hurdle models, using data from Rwanda. The results show that parental health shocks have a substantial influence on child work when households do not have health insurance. Depending on the gender of the sick parent, there is a substitution effect not only between the parent and the child on the labor market, but also between the time the child spends on different work activities. Altogether, results reveal that health insurance protects children against child work in the presence of parental health shocks.

Numerous primary investigators collected and processed long-termed time series on German educational statistics in the context of their studies. As a result, there are a multitude of quantitative empirical studies. On the one hand, there is the project group on German Educational Statistics.1 Its projects were targeted at describing and analyzing the long-term structural changes of the German educational system on a broad empirical and statistical basis. On the other hand, there are comprehensive data compilations of individual research projects, focusing on a wide variety of special educational research topics. The online database “histat” provides central digital access to these datasets on German educational history. Currently, it offers more than 120,000 long-term time series on the German educational system for a period of 200 years. The striking size of the database shows its key importance for researchers in the field of education. Thus, this paper aims to provide useful insights into the background of the database, the special characteristics of the data compilations and their analytical potential. Additionally, examples are given of how the data have already been used by researchers.

Family solidarities remain strong in African societies. In Ouagadougou, transfers within extended family networks provide an omnipresent means for coping with life's difficulties, and the desired number of children remains relatively high. The role of family networks in maintaining high fertility is rarely studied however for lack of data in conventional demographic surveys. This study uses original retrospective data and logistic regression methods to explore the role of the extended family's social capital in shaping women's desire for children in Ouagadougou. Results show that women belong to three types of family networks: (1) women who belong to large family networks on both her own and her husband's side and who maintain a moderate number of close relations with their own relatives; (2) women who also belong to large family networks on both their and their husband's sides but who maintain a greater number of close relations with their own blood relatives; (3) unmarried women with relatives only on their side and numerous close relations with their family. Support for children's schooling comes more often from women's relatives in networks type 2 and 3, and from husbands' relatives in network type 1. Support for children's schooling increases with the level of economic resources in family networks (proxied by the presence of a public employee), in all network types. Women in type 2 networks (centered on women's relatives) are more likely to want additional children compared to women in type 1 networks (centered on their husband's relatives), after controlling for economic resources in networks. This result suggests that practical support provided by family members could play a role, on top of economic support, in encouraging high fertility in Ouagadougou.

Advanced economies undergo three transitions during their development: (1) transition from a rural to an urban economy, (2) transition from low-income growth to high-income growth, (3) transition from high fertility and mortality rates to low modern levels. The timings of these transitions are correlated in the historical development of most advanced economies. I consider a nonlinear model of endogenous long-run economic and demographic change, in which child quantity-quality substitution is driven by declining child mortality. Because the model captures the interactions between all three transitions, it is able to explain three additional empirical patterns: a declining urban-rural wage gap, a declining rural-urban family size ratio, and most surprisingly, that early urbanization slows development. This third prediction distinguishes the model from other theories of long-run growth, and I document evidence for it in cross-country data.

Pensions may be provided for in a modern society by a mix of several methods, namely by voluntary individual savings, mandatory fully-funded occupational pension systems, mandatory social security financed by pay-as-you-go, and old-fashioned hoarding in cash. We call a specific mixture of the four systems a pension composition. We assume that individual workers decide on their own individual savings, that the fully-funded occupational system is decided upon by the age cohort of the median worker, and that social security is decided upon by the median voter. We assume that individual and collective pension savings are the only sources of capital supply. When capital supply equals demand from industry, there is equilibrium in the capital market with a corresponding equilibrium interest rate and pension composition. In this paper, we assume a demography with one hundred age brackets and we investigate how changes in the birth rates, survival rates, and the retirement age affect the pension composition and the capital market equilibrium. Our conclusion is that for a given technology, the pension composition and the interest rate are determined by the demography and cannot be modified at will as a long-term political instrument.

In 1960s Pakistan, every woman was giving birth to more than 6 children on average. In 2021, Pakistan still has the second-highest fertility rate in South Asia with every woman giving birth to 3.4 children on average. This paper uses four waves of Demographic and Health Survey data to empirically analyze trends in fertility in Pakistan between 1990 and 2018; accounting for wealth, education and locational differences, this paper looks at three additional pathways for reducing fertility: (i) electrification, (ii) access to TV and (iii) family planning commercials broadcast on television. Results show that electricity does not reduce fertility whereas access to television has a significant effect in reducing fertility rates. The content and evolution of Pakistani soap-operas are also discussed, and it is argued that the role models, the types of households and the messages conveyed by these soap-operas may represent strong pathways for the fertility decline.

We examine the birth order effects on health status for a sample of children aged 1–18 years in South Africa. Using a mother fixed-effects specification, we observe children's height-for-age z-score decreases with birth order. We investigate potential mechanisms underlying the birth order effect including those related to biology, parental preferences, and resource dilution. We also look at whether these effects are due to selection into families of different sizes. We find that the magnitude of the effect is larger in poorer and rural households and in larger families – suggesting that the birth order effect is largely due to resource dilution in economically constrained households.

This paper empirically investigates the effect of transnational migrants on gender equality in the country of origin measured by the share of women enrolled in the lower chamber of National Parliaments. We test for a “migration-induced transfer of norm” using panel data from 1970 to 2010 in 10-year intervals. Total international migration has a positive and significant effect on female political empowerment in countries of origin conditional on the initial female parliamentary participation in both origin and destination countries. Endogeneity issues are taken into account and results are tested under specific geo-political subsamples.

I examine recent changes in African mortality and discuss their potential economic and demographic effects. Growth in life expectancy sharply departed from its trend after 1990, and then experienced a sharp acceleration after 2005. This latter acceleration was due overwhelmingly to improvements in HIV and malaria. Economists differ in their estimates of how large the structural effect of health on income is, with many estimates being relatively small. Taking seriously the delays built into many plausible causal channels would lead one to expect that any economic effects of these mortality changes, if they are detectable at all, will not appear for several decades. By contrast, the effect of declining mortality, especially from malaria, should soon be visible in data on population age structure in some countries.

Investment in family planning (FP) provides returns through a lifetime. Global evidence shows that FP is the second-best buy in terms of return on investment after liberalizing trade. In this study, we estimate the cumulative benefits of FP investments for India from 1991 to 2016 and project them up to 2061 with four scenarios of fertility levels. The findings suggest that India will have greater elasticity of FP investments to lifetime economic returns compared to the world average (cost–revenue ratio of 1:120). We have taken four scenarios for the goalpost, viz., 2.1, 1.8, 1.6, and 1.4. Although different scenarios of total fertility rate (TFR) levels at the goalpost (i.e., the year 2061) offer varied lifetime returns from FP, scenario TFR < 1.8 will be counterproductive and will reduce the potential benefits. With a comprehensive approach, if the country focuses more on improving the quality of FP services and on reducing the unmet need for FP to enhance reproductive health care and expand maximum opportunities for education and employment for both women and men, it can improve its potential to reap more benefits.

A general equilibrium model that characterizes the gap between optimal and equilibrium fertility and investment in human capital is developed. The aggregate production function exhibits increasing returns to population arising from specialization, but households face a quantity–quality trade-off when choosing their fertility and how much education these children receive. We show that equilibrium fertility is too low and investment per child is too high, in contrast to a current planner who internalizes the externality of current fertility on the next generation's productivity. We next introduce mortality of young adults in the model and assume that households have a precautionary demand for children. Human capital investment lowers next generation mortality. This model endogenously generates a demographic transition but, since households do not internalize the negative effects of human capital on mortality, the equilibrium demographic transition takes place many years later than the efficient solution. We show that ${\rm {\cal A}}$-efficient fertility and human capital investment pair can switch; in high-mortality regimes, ${\rm {\cal A}}$-efficient fertility is lower than equilibrium fertility, and ${\rm {\cal A}}$-efficient human capital investment is higher than equilibrium investment. In the zero mortality regime, however, ${\rm {\cal A}}$-efficient fertility exceeds equilibrium fertility, and ${\rm {\cal A}}$-efficient human capital investment is lower than the equilibrium choice.

We link causally the riskiness of men's management of their finances with the probability of their experiencing a divorce. Our point of departure is that when comparing single men to married men, the former manage their finances in a more aggressive (that is, riskier) manner. Assuming that single men believe that low relative wealth has a negative effect on their standing in the marriage market and that they care about their standing in that market more than married men do, we find that a stronger distaste for low relative wealth translates into reduced relative risk aversion and, consequently, into riskier financial behavior. With this relationship in place we show how this difference varies depending on the “background” likelihood of divorce and, hence, on the likelihood of re-entry into the marriage market: married men in environments that are more prone to divorce exhibit risk-taking behavior that is more similar to that of single men than married men in environments that are little prone to divorce. We offer a theoretical contribution that helps inform and interpret empirical observations and regularities and can serve as a guide for follow-up empirical work, having established and identified the direction of causality.

We used the 2016 Hong Kong Census data and the diagonal reference model to investigate the effects of partners' educational pairings on fertility in Hong Kong. Our findings suggest a negative relationship between couples' educational achievements and their fertility. Moreover, males' educational attainment is more consequential of whether having children or not and both males' and females' educational attainments are determinants of the number of children to raise. In addition, the more educated a wife is relative to her husband, the less likely the couple is to have children. Once these educationally hypogamous couples have at least one child, they tend to have fewer children than their homogamous counterparts. By contrast, couples with a relatively more educated male are more likely to have children and tend to rear more children than those in educationally homogamous marriages.

It has been widely perceived in South Korea that the rise in a woman's income is negative for her childbirth. This study tries to verify the hypothesis empirically because the Korean government initiated the basic plan for low fertility in 2006 and has constantly strengthened work–family balance policy since then. Our analysis using a household annual data over 18 years, 1999–2016, indicates that married women's economic power relates positively to childbirth for the period after 2006. We also find that the higher birth likelihood among top income quartile women is largely attributed to their better accessibility to maternity protection benefits. These findings imply that the government's efforts to support work–family balance have been successful to a certain extent. However, the benefits remain limited only to high-income women.

There is considerable uncertainty regarding changes in future mortality rates. This article investigates the impact of such longevity risk on discounted government annuity benefits for retirees. It is critical to forecast more accurate future mortality rates to improve our estimation of an expected annuity payout. Thus, we utilize the Lee–Carter model, which is well-known as a parsimonious dynamic mortality model. We find strong evidence that female retirees are likely to receive more public lifetime annuity than males in the USA, which is associated with systematic mortality rate differences between genders. A cross-country comparison presents that the current public annuity system would not fully cover retiree's longevity risk. Every additional year of life expectancy leaves future retirees exposed to high risk, arising from high volatility of lifetime annuities. Also, because the growth in life expectancy is higher than the growth of expected public pension, there will be a financial risk to retirees.

The availability of child-care services has often been advocated as one of the instruments to counter the fertility decline observed in many high-income countries. In the recent past, large inflows of low-skilled migrants have substantially increased the supply of child-care services. In this paper, we examine if immigration has actually affected fertility exploiting the natural experiment occurred in Italy in 2007, when a large inflow of migrants—many of them specialized in the supply of child care—arrived unexpectedly. With a difference-in-differences method, we show that immigrant female workers have increased native births by a number that ranges roughly from 2% to 4%. We validate our result by the implementation of an instrumental variable approach and several robustness tests, all concluding that the increase in the supply of child-care services by immigrant women has positively affected native fertility.