Duke University Press

Using data from India, we estimate the relationship between household wealth and children’s school enrollment. We proxy wealth by constructing a linear index from asset ownership indicators, using principal-components analysis to derive weights. In Indian data this index is robust to the assets included, and produces internally coherent results. State-level results correspond well to independent data on per capita output and poverty. To validate the method and to show that the asset index predicts enrollments as accurately as expenditures, or more so, we use data sets from Indonesia, Pakistan, and Nepal that contain information on both expenditures and assets. The results show large, variable wealth gaps in children’s enrollment across Indian states. On average a “rich” child is 31 percentage points more likely to be enrolled than a “poor” child, but this gap varies from only 4.6 percentage points in Kerala to 38.2 in Uttar Pradesh and 42.6 in Bihar.

Mortality rates in the United States fell more rapidly during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries than in any other period in American history. This decline coincided with an epidemiological transition and the disappearance of a mortality “penalty” associated with living in urban areas. There is little empirical evidence and much unresolved debate about what caused these improvements, however. In this article, we report the causal influence of clean water technologies— filtration and chlorination—on mortality in major cities during the early twentieth century. Plausibly exogenous variation in the timing and location of technology adoption was used to identify these effects, and the validity of this identifying assumption is examined in detail. We found that clean water was responsible for nearly half the total mortality reduction in major cities, three quarters of the infant mortality reduction, and nearly two thirds of the child mortality reduction. Rough calculations suggest that the social rate of return to these technologies was greater than 23 to 1, with a cost per person-year saved by clean water of about $500 in 2003 dollars. Implications for developing countries are briefly considered.

Công trình này cung cấp tổng quan về các nguồn dữ liệu khoa học xã hội tiêu chuẩn hiện có cho phép nghiên cứu có hệ thống về cộng đồng người đồng tính nam và đồng tính nữ tại Hoa Kỳ. Đối với mỗi nguồn dữ liệu, chúng tôi xem xét cách thức xác định xu hướng tình dục, và ghi nhận kích thước mẫu tiềm năng. Chúng tôi đặc biệt chú ý đến vấn đề quan trọng về sai số đo lường, đặc biệt là mức độ mà các cá nhân được ghi nhận là đồng tính nam và đồng tính nữ thực sự được ghi nhận chính xác. Mối quan tâm của chúng tôi là vì người đồng tính nam và đồng tính nữ chiếm một tỉ lệ nhỏ trong dân số, nên các vấn đề đo lường nhỏ có thể dẫn đến những sai lầm nghiêm trọng trong suy luận. Khi xem xét người đồng tính nam và đồng tính nữ trong nhiều bộ dữ liệu, chúng tôi cũng đạt được mục tiêu thứ hai: Chúng tôi cung cấp một bộ các thống kê về cộng đồng này có liên quan đến một số cuộc tranh luận chính sách hiện nay.

Although adverse consequences of poverty for children are documented widely, little is understood about the mechanisms through which the effects of poverty disadvantage young children. In this analysis we investigate multiple mechanisms through which poverty affects a child’s intellectual development. Using data from the NLSY and structural equation models, we have constructed five latent factors (cognitive stimulation, parenting style, physical environment, child’s ill health at birth, and ill health in childhood) and have allowed these factors, along with child care, to mediate the effects of poverty and other exogenous variables. We produce two main findings. First, the influence of family poverty on children’s intellectual development is mediated completely by the intervening mechanisms measured by our latent factors. Second, our analysis points to cognitive stimulation in the home, and (to a lesser extent) to parenting style, physical environment of the home, and poor child health at birth, as mediating factors that are affected by lack of income and that influence children’s intellectual development.

If couples decide to have fewer children in order to achieve higher “quality” offspring, are they correct in assuming that the quality of children bears an important and inverse relation to family size? If they are correct, how does number of children operate to affect individual quality? This research (using U.S. whites primarily) takes educational attainment (among adults) and college plans (among youngsters) as the principal indicators of quality, but also directs some attention to measures of intelligence. The analysis supports the “dilution model” (on average, the more children the lower the quality of each child) and indicates that only children do not suffer from lack of siblings, and that other last-borns are not handicapped by a “teaching deficit.” Number of siblings (relative to other background variables) is found to have an important detrimental impact on child quality—an impact compounded by the fact that, when couples are at a stage in life to make family-size decisions, most background factors (however important to the quality of their children) are no longer readily manipulable. A special path analysis of college plans among boys uses a modification of Sewell’s Wisconsin Model as its base. The results show that number of siblings is a negative influence on intervening variables affecting college plans. In general, the research documents the unfavorable consequences for individual siblings of high fertility, even in a country that is (at least for whites) as socially, economically, and politically advantaged as the United States.

We explore the determinants of domestic violence in two rural areas of Bangladesh. We found increased education, higher socioeconomic status, non-Muslim religion, and extended family residence to be associated with lower risks of violence. The effects of women’s status on violence was found to be highly context-specific. In the more culturally conservative area, higher individual-level women’s autonomy and short-term membership in savings and credit groups were both associated with significantly elevated risks of violence, and community-level variables were unrelated to violence. In the less culturally conservative area, in contrast, individual-level women’s status indicators were unrelated to the risk of violence, and community-level measures of women’s status were associated with significantly lower risks of violence, presumably by reinforcing nascent normative changes in gender relations.

The stress-threshold model (Wolpert, 1965; Brown and Moore, 1970) assumes that people do not consider moving unless they experience residential stress. This paper develops a similar model of residential mobility in which residential satisfaction acts as an intervening variable between individual and residence variables and mobility. The model is tested with data from a panel study of Rhode Island residents. The results indicate that residential satisfaction at the first interview is related to the wish to move and to mobility in the year following the interview. Individual and residence characteristics such as age of head duration of residence, home ownership, and room crowding are shown to affect mobility through their effect on residential satisfaction.

Mortality patterns and trajectories in closely related populations are likely to be similar in some respects, and differences are unlikely to increase in the long run. It should therefore be possible to improve the mortality forecasts for individual countries by taking into account the patterns in a larger group. Using the Human Mortality Database, we apply the Lee-Carter model to a group of populations, allowing each its own age pattern and level of mortality but imposing shared rates of change by age. Our forecasts also allow divergent patterns to continue for a while before tapering off. We forecast greater longevity gains for the United States and lesser ones for Japan relative to separate forecasts.