PEER EFFECTS AND FERTILITY PREFERENCES IN CHINA: EVIDENCE FROM THE CHINA LABOR-FORCE DYNAMICS SURVEY

Despite empirical evidence that individuals form their fertility preferences by observing social norms and interactions in their environments, the exact impact of these peer effects remains unclear. We thus use data from the 2014 and 2016 China Labor-force Dynamics Survey to investigate the association between community-level peer effects and fertility preferences among Chinese women aged 18–49. Whereas our baseline results indicate that 11.96% of these women would prefer 1 or no children, 74.1% would like 2 children and 13.93% would prefer 3 or more children. A one unit increase in community-level peer fertility reduces the preference of wanting only one child by 14.3%, whereas it increases the probability of preferring three children by 9.3% and four or more children by 4.8%. Hence, overall, we find a relatively strong peer effect on individual fertility preferences in communities characterized by generally low fertility rates, which provide support for the role of social norms in the fertility choices of reproductive-aged Chinese women.

Disrespectful Maternity Care: Labor Room Violence in Government Health Facilities in India

The government of India endeavors to enhance the satisfaction of beneficiaries by ensuring ‘Respectful Maternity Care’ (RMC) at public health facilities. However, through observations in public hospitals in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, we document widespread mistreatment of pregnant women. We found that women were subjected to different extensive verbal and physical violence. They were also humiliated for their fertility choices and had intrauterine devices (IUDs) inserted without their full knowledge and consent. A target driven approach towards contraception and population control, staff’s burn-out from too many patients and long shifts, the lack of knowledge among staff on how to deal with the legitimate stress of a life and death situation, and a highly unequal society where it is socially acceptable to victimize low-ranking people, collectively contribute to different forms of violence against pregnant women in delivery rooms in India.

The nexus between education and fertility in six European countries

Given the many linkages between education and family behaviour, the expansion of higher education especially among women in recent decades may have important consequences for fertility in Europe. This is a crucial factor in both the New Home Economics (NHE) theory and the Second Demographic Transition (SDT) that predict a negative association between fertility and education. However, more recently, the Gender Revolution (GR) approach has emphasised the role of gender egalitarianism both in society and within households as a boost for fertility. By adopting a comparative perspective on six European countries, this paper reports our research on the effect of education on the fertility choices in light of the foregoing three different theoretical explanations. Using data from the second wave of Generation and Gender surveys (GGS) for Bulgaria, Czech Republic, France, Germany, and Poland, and the ISTAT survey “Famiglie e Soggetti Sociali” for Italy, we estimated the propensity to have the first and the second child birth on women born between 1940 and 1979 by means of multiprocess hazard models.For the first childbirth, the influence of education on fertility behaviours not only remains important but also tends to increase among younger cohorts. This result matches the NHE and SDT explanation, suggesting a similar evolution towards an erosion of the family. Conversely, for the second childbirth we found marked differences among countries suggesting an East-West polarisation giving support to the GR approach. However, peculiarities for the Italian case linked to a tempo effect emphasize the need to go beyond the West-East dichotomy.

Aspirations and Economic Behavior

This article reviews the literature on aspirations in economics, with a particular focus on socially determined aspirations. The core theory builds on two fundamental principles: ( a) Aspirations can serve to inspire, but still higher aspirations can lead to frustration and resentment; and ( b) aspirations are largely determined by an individual's social environment. Using the structure of this core theory, we discuss the implications of our framework for the study of interpersonal inequality, social conflict, fertility choices, risk taking, and goal setting.

Fertility choices in China under the two-child policy

Individuals who are economically well-off, or who possess a specific or mixed-gender preference for their children tend to have a much higher intention to have two children. The findings of this study strongly support the fact that ‘cultural factors’ play an important role in determining Chinese people’s intention to have two children. But for policymakers, the overall findings imply that the ‘two-child’ policy is likely ineffective in stimulating a higher fertility rate in the short term given that the economic wellbeing of a family exerts a far more significant impact on fertility intention than cultural and behavioral dimensions.

A Structural Approach to Assessing Retention Policies in Public Schools

One out of five entering public school teachers leave the field within the first 4 years. Despite that the presence of a newborn child is the single most important determinant of exits of female teachers, retention policy recommendations rely on models that take children as predetermined. This article formulates and estimates a structural dynamic model that explicitly addresses the interdependence between fertility and labor force participation choices. The model with unobserved heterogeneity in preferences for children fits the data and produces reasonable forecasts of labor force attachment to the teaching sector. Structural estimates of the model are used to predict the effects that wage increases and reductions in the cost of childcare would have on female teachers’ employment and fertility choices. The estimates unpack important features of the interdependence of fertility and labor supply and contradict previous studies that did not consider the endogeneity between these two choices.