Raising productivity with pension premium

We argue that parents underinvest in growing their own children's capability in the absence of property rights over their future income, and that causes economic waste. No amount of collaborative choice among contemporary adults for public education could eliminate it because they face a resource constraint set by their predecessors. Such intergenerational dependence requires an intergenerational contract instead. It involves rewarding parents with a pension premium tied to their own children's taxable income paired with a matching subsidy to parental expenditure. We show how it fully internalizes the intergenerational externality, related to parenting, to eliminate economic waste and, thereby, to raise labor productivity and economic welfare. Our quantitative analysis of a baseline economy reveals significant welfare gains in economies with population ageing coupled with a low degree of parental care for children's future welfare and high returns to parental expenditure on children.     

环境行为学视角下建成环境与儿童出行 影响机制研究

儿童依赖建成环境,并通过基本的出行行为满足其 自身发展的各项必要需求,其中儿童独立出行水平和出行方式 至关重要。随着中国城镇化持续推进,大城市边缘的小城镇在 迅速发展的同时,其建成环境也给儿童出行带来了一定安全隐 患,儿童出行安全问题值得关注。从环境行为学视角,结合既 往文献将儿童出行的影响因素归纳整理成个体、环境和其他因 素,随后对长沙市岳麓区莲花镇第五实验小学1 509名6~12 岁儿童及其家长展开实证调查和数据统计分析。结果显示： 儿童和家长对环境的安全感知会对儿童的出行决策产生较大 影响,机动车交通量及速度、交叉路口、道路复杂程度、步 道和自行车道及其基础设施设置、自然水体等是主要的显著 影响因素。据此,从空间布局、道路设计、交通设施配置和 社会环境方面提出了提升儿童出行安全水平的小城镇规划策 略建议。     

Parental compensatory behaviors and early child health outcomes in Cebu,Philippines

A dynamic optimization model of parents choosing investments in their children's health motivates an empirical model of parents' choices of health inputs for their children and the impacts of these decisions on their children's subsequent health. Estimates of the child health input demand functions and the child health production functions from the Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Survey accord with the prediction that optimizing behavior results in higher levels of aggregate child health. Observable parental behaviors respond to the physical developmental status of their children. These parental responses appear to yield large and statistically significant improvements in children's early physiological outcomes. However, because some health inputs choices are not observable, it is impossible to ascertain whether these measured effects are due solely to variations in the observed input choices.     

Patience among children

Recent policy initiatives offer cash payments to children (and often their families) to induce better health and educational choices. These policies implicitly assume that children are especially impatient (i.e., have high discount rates); however, little is known about the nature of children's patience, how it varies across children, and whether children can even make rational inter-temporal choices. This paper examines the inter-temporal choices of 5- to 16-year-old children in an artefactual field experiment. We examine their choices between varying levels of compensation received in 2 or 4 months in the future and in 0 or 2 months in the future. We find that children's choices are consistent with hyperbolic discounting, boys are less patient than girls, older children are more patient and that mathematical achievement test scores, private schooling and parent's patience are not correlated with children's patience. We also find that although more than 25% of children do not make rational inter-temporal choices within a single two-period time frame, we cannot find variables that explain this behavior other than age and standardized mathematical achievement test scores.     

Malnutrition and Child Labor

In pre‐industrial and developing economies, it is common to find (i) entire families, including children, working together in family farms or urban factories; and (ii) a positive link between a person's consumption and her productivity. This paper argues that there is a natural reason for the concurrence of (i) and (ii). As a rule, households are characterized by intra‐household altruism: an increase in the income of an individual increases the consumption of all household members. Hence, when an employer pays an adult worker a high wage to enhance her productivity, part of it ends up augmenting her children's consumption and productivity. One way for the employer to prevent this leakage and internalize the externality is to employ the children as well. This explains the higher incidence of family labor in poor societies where (ii) is more likely to be true.     

Child Schooling and Work Decisions in India: The Role of Household and Regional Gender Equity

Abstract

This paper tests three hypotheses about how mothers' autonomy in India affects their children's participation in school and the labor market. To do so it extends the concept of mothers' autonomy beyond the household to include the constraints imposed by the extent of gender equity in the regions in which these women live. This study began with the expectation that increased autonomy for Indian mothers living in heterosexual households would increase child schooling and decrease child work. However, the results are mixed, indicating that mother's autonomy can be reinforced or constrained by the environment. The paper concludes that mothers and fathers in India make different decisions for girls vis-à-vis boys and that the variables reflecting mothers' autonomy vary in their impact, so that mothers' level of education relative to fathers' is not often statistically significant, while mothers' increased contributions to household expenditure decrease the probability of schooling and girls' work.     

Child fostering in Africa: When labor and schooling motives may coexist

The paper proposes a theoretical framework for understanding purposive child fostering in Africa, whereby a non-orphaned child is sent to live temporarily with relatives. In the model, adults decide whether to foster in or out a child in conjunction with other household choices, e.g. own time allocation between market and non-market activities, children's amount of work, and schooling. By allowing for positive externalities from fostering, and thus asymmetric motives for fostering in (labor) and out (human capital), the proposed framework predicts that school-age children are sent to better-off households and that some families may foster in and out simultaneously. The model identifies the conditions under which all actors involved, children included, may benefit from fostering arrangements, but also points to situations where fostering may become an opportunity to marginalize a subset of children. The paper aims to provide a sound theoretical foundation that sheds light on why there exists mixed empirical evidence on the effects of fostering on children's well being, and cautions against demonizing non-parent residence as unequivocally detrimental to children.     

新时代儿童健康教育体系协同治理研究

儿童健康是国家健康的起点与基础,是提升劳动力素质与人口质量的关键环节,而开展儿童健康教育是实现儿童健康的必要路径。在新时代背景下,从健康资本、健康均等受益维度出发,构建与完善协同发展的儿童健康教育体系,加大政府、学校、家庭、社会融合协调的参与力度,充分发挥针对儿童的健康教育机制作用,对促进儿童的健康成长,实现健康国家战略具有重要的意义。本文在对我国儿童健康教育的发展现状进行全面概括的基础上,深入剖析我国儿童健康教育体系发展所面临的困境与挑战,并相应提出了我国儿童健康教育体系协同治理及发展的政策建议：(一) 将大健康的儿童健康教育理念渗入到儿童健康教育长远规划中去;(二) 建立科学的识别机制,细分儿童健康教育服务需求;(三) 完善儿童健康保障相关的法律规范,建立儿童健康教育体系的监督反馈评估机制;(四) 提升儿童健康教育服务能力,尤其关注儿童心理及社会健康教育,建立健全儿童健康教育服务递送体系;(五) 建立促进多元主体共同协同治理的机制,建立以儿童为中心的儿童健康教育协同发展体系。     

The causal effects of parents’ schooling on children's schooling in urban China

Parental schooling is widely thought to improve child outcomes. But most studies on parental-child relations are associative, without control for estimation problems, such as unobserved intergenerationally-correlated endowments, if causality is of interest. The few exceptions are relatively recent studies that focus on high-income countries (HICs), with their much different contexts than the low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in which the vast majority of children globally are growing up. This paper estimates the causal (conditional on the assumptions for the model) relationships between parents’ schooling and their children's schooling in the most populous LMIC, using adult identical (monozygotic, MZ) twins data from urban China. Our ordinary least-squares estimates show that one-year increases in maternal and paternal schooling are associated, respectively, with 0.4 and 0.5 more years of children's schooling. However, if we control for genetic and other endowment effects by using within-MZ fixed effects, the results indicate that mothers''and fathers’ schooling have no significant effects on children's schooling. Our main results remain with various robustness checks, including controlling for measurement error. These results suggest that the positive associations between children's and parents’ schooling in standard cross-sectional estimates in this major LMIC are mainly due to the correlation between parents’ unobserved endowments and their schooling and not the effects of their schooling per se.     

Survival of the gene,intergenerational transfers and precautionary saving

This paper provides a model of bequest and investment in children's human capital at low incomes. It posits that parents and children are linked through their common concern of grandchildren and intergenerational transfers provide a material basis for the perpetuation of the family line. The model characterizes intergenerational strategic interactions in a dynamic game theoretical framework. Moreover, it explores intergenerational uncertainty as a source of precautionary saving. In contrast with the existing literature, the model implies that there are qualitative differences between precautionary saving from one's own income uncertainty and precautionary bequests from children's income uncertainty.     

Why do parents socialize their children to behave pro-socially? An information-based theory

We present a model of intergenerational transmission of pro-social values in which parents have information about relevant characteristics of society that is not directly available to their children. Differently from existing models of cultural transmission of values (such as Bisin and Verdier, 2001, Tabellini, 2008) we assume that parents are exclusively concerned with their children's material welfare. If parents coordinate their educational choices, a child would look at her system of values to predict the values of her contemporaries, with whom she may interact. A parent may thus choose to instill pro-social values into his child in order to signal to her that others can generally be trusted. This implies that parents may optimally decide to endow their children with values that stand in contrast with maximization of material welfare, even if their children's material welfare is all they care about.     

重庆市北碚老城区儿童户外活动空间配置 社会绩效评价

为更准确地反映重庆市北碚老城区儿童享有户外活 动空间资源的现状，进一步探索城市公共空间配置的社会绩效 评价方法，基于行政单元之下更微观的城市空间格局和更精细 的常住儿童人口数据，以地形、道路、边界围合及用地性质等 因素划定的功能单元作为研究单元，计算各功能单元儿童人均 享有面积，进而评价儿童户外活动空间配置的社会绩效。结果 表明：北碚老城区缺乏对专属型儿童户外活动空间的建设；儿 童户外活动空间配置不公平；相对低绩效水平的功能单元占单 元总数的29.41%，未来应首先关注低绩效单元中儿童活动空 间的建设。     

Mother's autonomy: impact on the quality of children's healthcare in India

Given the poor condition of children's health in developing countries, this article seeks to examine two hypotheses concerning healthcare for children. First, does mother's autonomy influence the quality of child healthcare and, second, which is related to the first, whether mother's autonomy reduces the apparent gender bias in child healthcare. Using household survey data from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in India the article finds that for the most part as the mother's autonomy (measured several different ways) increases, the quality of care for children improves. The results also indicate that gender bias exists in the provision of quality healthcare for children. Male children generally receive better quality care. However, for several measures of female autonomy, an increase in such autonomy reduces the bias. The results of this analysis have important policy implications and provide additional insight into the state of affairs of children's health in rural India.     

Investment credit and child labour

It is generally assumed that credit has a positive effect on children's schooling among poor households. This article shows that need not be the case when households obtain credit for investment purposes. In fact, investment loans may not have any effect on the likelihood of schooling for children who work in their family business. Our estimates confirm that this is the case; credit used to finance investments has no effect on the odds of schooling for employed children. This may be because investment loans increase children's labour productivity, which in turn increases the opportunity cost of schooling. The results of this study suggest that improving access to credit may not, by itself, constitute a solution to the problem of child labour in developing countries.     

Intergenerational transfers,demographic transition,and altruism: Problems in developing Asia

This paper develops a three‐period overlapping‐generations model where middle‐aged agents care about not only their own lifetime utility but also their old parents' and children's well‐being. The doubly altruistic agents choose amounts of intergenerational transfers to their old parents and children as well as private savings. The government specifies amounts of public transfers from working adults to the dependents. The model also takes the effects of demographic transition on the burdens of supporting the elderly and children into account. Using 23 countries' data from the National Transfer Accounts (NTA ), we estimate the degrees of filial and parental altruism and adjust them for their respective life expectancy and fertility rates. The findings suggest that people in developing countries are more parentally altruistic than those in developed ones while the adjusted degree of filial altruism tends to be low in developing Asia. Our welfare analyses reveal that the developing Asian countries must introduce more comprehensive public welfare programs for the elderly to maximize social welfare. Moreover, their low adjusted degree of filial altruism may trap the developing Asian countries at the low levels of public old‐age support and social welfare as the further demographic transition ensues.     

Causal Effects of Paternity Leave on Children and Parents

Reserving a share of the parental leave period for fathers is considered necessary in order to induce fathers to take leave, and to increase men's participation in child‐rearing. We investigate how a parental leave reform directed towards fathers affected leave‐taking, and, in turn, children's and parents' long‐term outcomes. A paternal leave quota greatly increases the share of men taking paternity leave. We find evidence that children's school performance improves as a result, particularly in families where the father has higher education than the mother. We find no evidence that paternity leave counters the traditional allocation of parents' labor supply.     

Social externalities of women empowerment: Evidence from suffrage movements of late nineteenth and early twentieth century United States

Previous literature suggests that empowering women is associated with children's improved outcomes. However, little is known about its effects on children's later-life crime and incarceration. We argue that women empowerment through suffrage law changes during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the US generated incentives for women to invest in their children's human capital. The accumulated human capital then has the potential to reduce future incarceration of children. We use full-count censuses 1920–1930, implement a difference-in-difference framework, and empirically show that childhood exposure to suffrage laws is associated with considerable reductions in incarceration. The effects appear to be primarily driven by decreases in male and Black incarceration. The balancing tests rule out the concern that the effects are driven by demographic compositional changes or endogenous changes in other state-level characteristics. Furthermore, an event-study analysis rejects the concern that the effects are driven by preexisting trends in incarceration among exposed cohorts. The findings of this research note offer informative implications for overlooked externalities of women empowerment in a historical setting.     

Optimal long-term care policy in an intergenerational exchange setting

We examine the optimality of public long-term care policy, incorporating an exchange game between elderly parents and adult children and transfer-seeking competition among siblings, instead of children's altruism. Results reveal that when children compete to obtain more valuable bequests from parents in exchange for elderly care, public long-term care policy is optimal if government can provide long-term care more efficiently than children can, thereby reducing parental bequests, possibly to zero. This is likely to be the case when children's wages are high. Formal long-term care might not be necessary if parents can receive adequate informal care in exchange for bequests to children with low wages.     

Catholic Economic Association Minutes of the Executive Council Meeting May 13, 1961

This paper applies thematic analysis to survey data obtained from a sample of AFDC recipients to investigate the complexities of single-parent decision-making in low-income households. A basic needs budget is developed to determine the adequacy of women's wages to provide for children's minimal material needs. In surveys, parents indicate their primary goal is the well-being of the children, determined by the adequacy of several types of resources, which we categorize into four groups: 1) material resources, 2) caring resources, 3) community resources, and 4) the macro-level environment. Using this framework, we develop a schematic model of single-parent decision-making, incorporating the assumption that children's level of need and well-being are determined not only by the cost and availability of material resources but also by psychological factors such as gender conflicts, neighborhood safety, as well as parents' time and social networks that provide caring labor.     

A global measure of child health-related quality of life: reliability and validity of the Child Health and Illness Profile - Child Edition (CHIP-CE) global score

SUMMARY

As the treatment of children with medical and psychiatric disorders becomes increasingly reliant on pharmacological agents, it has become critical to assess the overall effects of these interventions on the health and well being of the children. The Child Health and Illness Profile - Child Edition (CHIP-CE) is a validated health-related quality of life (HRQoL) measure with five core domains: Satisfaction, Comfort, Resilience, Risk Avoidance and Achievement. The domain scores are valuable for identifying the area(s) of HRQoL in which children are most affected by an illness and its treatment. For some purposes, however, it would be desirable to

measure overall HRQoL, as no single domain score effectively describes the whole child. A global score encompassing all domains could provide such a measure of HRQoL and could be an efficient outcome for evaluating the overall effect of an intervention. This article presents the development and validation of a global score for the CHIP-CE based on parents' reports. The investigations demonstrated that the CHIP-CE global score is a reliable measure of children's HRQoL. Tests of validity supported the use of the CHIP-CE global score, indicating that it is an additional tool to monitor and evaluate the outcomes of interventions in groups of children.