Household production, full consumption and the costs of children

Recent work criticises both the logic and relevance of the theoretical basis of the approach to estimating the costs of raising children adopted in much of the economics literature. This tends to be restricted purely to models in which the household members consume market goods with given household income. The “costs of children” are perceived essentially as market consumption costs. This ignores the fact that an important, possibly preponderant element of child costs takes the form of parental time, which must be diverted from alternative uses such as market work, other household production activities, and leisure, to care for children. The studies also ignore the question of the differential incidence of child costs on adult members of the household. In this paper, we first of all argue that a satisfactory theoretical approach to modelling child costs must simultaneously incorporate an “individualistic” formulation of the household and a formal treatment of household production. We then provide such a model. Using data from a time use survey we estimate specialised versions of the model for families with two children and use the results to derive the intra-family distribution of resources and implied child-rearing costs.     

Evidence That the Presence of a Half-Sibling Negatively Impacts a Child's Personal Development

A bstract .   This paper examines the relationship between a child's family structure and his or her development. While most prior research in this area has defined a child's family structure according to his or her relationship to adults in the household, this study examines the relationship of the child to not only adults but also other children in the household. We provide evidence that half-siblings brought into the household from previous relationships affect the well-being of children born into a subsequent marriage who live with both of their biological parents. Stepchildren and children living with both biological parents exhibited more behavior problems and scored worse on reading achievement tests when half-siblings were present. In contrast, stepchildren living without half-siblings in the home fared no worse than biological children without half-siblings. These results not only highlight a previously overlooked at-risk group (children living with half-siblings brought into the household from a parent's prior relationship), but they also illustrate the potential ramifications of classifying children into family structures based on their individual relationship with the householders, rather than based on the family types. The authors illustrate the relevance of these findings to current policy-making decisions regarding marriage promotion policies and child support legislation.     

Sons,daughters, wives,and the labour market outcomes of West German men

We find a strong association between family status and labor market outcomes for recent cohorts of West German men in the German Socio-Economic Panel. Living with a partner and living with a child both have substantial positive effects on earnings and work hours. These effects persist in individual fixed effects models that control for correlation in time-invariant unobservables that affect both family and work outcomes, though the inclusion of length of marriage reduces the effects of children. Child gender also matters — a first son increases fathers' work hours by 100 hours per year more than a first daughter, and positive effects of sons on work hours and earnings are particularly strong for men with higher levels of education. There is evidence of son “preference” in the probability that a German man is observed to be coresiding with a son — men are more likely to remain in the same household with a male child than a female child.     

Child Growth in the Time of Drought

This paper examines the impact of rainfall shocks on a measure of child health, growth in height, drawing on a unique household panel data set from rural Zimbabwe. We find that children aged 12 to 24 months lose 1.5-2 cm of growth in the aftermath of a drought. Catch-up growth in these children is limited so that this growth faltering has a permanent effect. By contrast, there is no evidence that older children experience a slowdown in growth. There is some evidence that the loss in growth is unequally distributed with children residing in poorer households and offspring of women who are daughters of the household head appearing to be especially vulnerable.     

Accounting for Changes in Income Inequality: Decomposition Analyses for the UK, 1978–2008

We analyse income inequality in the UK from 1978 to 2009 in order to understand why income inequality rose very rapidly from 1978 to 1991 but then remained broadly unchanged. We find that inequality in earnings among employees has risen fairly steadily since 1978, but other factors that caused income inequality to rise before 1991 have since gone into reverse. Inequality in investment and pension income has fallen since 1991, as has inequality between those with and without employment. Furthermore, certain household types – notably the elderly and those with young children – which had relatively low incomes in the period to 1991 have seen their incomes converge with others.     

Maternal employment,migration, and child development

We analyze the roles of and interrelationships among school inputs and parental inputs in affecting child development through the specification and estimation of a behavioral model of household migration and maternal employment decisions. We integrate information on these decisions with observations on child outcomes over a 13-year period from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY). We find that the impact of our school quality measures diminishes by factors of 2 to 4 after accounting for the fact that families may choose where to live in part based on school characteristics and labor market opportunities. The positive statistical relationship between child outcomes and maternal employment reverses sign and remains statistically significant after controlling for its possible endogeneity. Our estimates imply that when parental responses are taken into account, policy changes in school quality end up having only minor impacts on child test scores.     

Household Shocks and Education Investments in Madagascar

This paper investigates the impact of exogenous shocks to household income, assets and labour supply on children's school attendance in Madagascar. The analysis uses a unique data set with 10 years of recall data on school attendance and household shocks. We find that the probability of a child dropping out of school increases significantly when the household experiences an illness, death or asset shock. We propose a test to distinguish whether the impact of shocks on school attendance can be attributed to credit constraints, labour market rigidities, or a combination of the two. The results suggest that credit constraints, rather than labour market rigidities, explain the inability of households in Madagascar to keep their children in school during times of economic stress.     

城市化进程中新生代农民工随迁子女教育研究——基于教育认知度及教育行为的视角

本文通过对225位进城新生代农民工的调查,采用个体访谈和发放问卷相结合的的调研形式,首先分析了新生代农民工对子女教育问题的认知程度,得出结论:新生代农民工对子女教育的价值认知度,期望认知度和收益认知度都非常高。其次,运用Logistic模型分析了新生代农民工子女教育认知度对行为选择的影响,实证分析结果表明:新生代农民工对子女教育认知度与对其子女学校教育的资金投入行为、对子女教育的辅导时间投入行为、对学校老师的交流子女学习情况的行为均呈正相关。最后,提出相关政策建议。     

Maternal labour supply and child nutrition in West Africa

It is widely recognized that women in developing countries have dual roles as generators of household income and as primary caregivers to their children. Many policies directed at reducing poverty or malnutrition involve one or the other of these roles. Programs to reduce child malnutrition, for example, typically target mothers as caregivers. However, because of the time constraints women face, there are potential conflicts between women's different activities about which policy makers are rarely informed. Nutrition interventions have not usually considered the barriers to participation in such programs facing mothers who, either by choice or necessity, have entered the labour force (Leslie, 1988; Engle, 1994). Similarly, policies directed at improving female employment opportunities typically ignore women's important role in household activities related to children's healthy development.
  In this paper we address a potentially important implication of women's multiple roles and the time constraints they face: that female labour force participation, by reducing the time available for household activities related to child development, may place young children at nutritional risk.     

Shrinking Cities,Shrinking Households,or Both?

Household size decline accounts for a substantial portion of population loss in shrinking cities, yet little research has focused on it. Much of the literature presents a simple growth/decline binary that is largely determined via population figures. In this paper, we highlight the importance and assess the impact of household size changes on population decline, and determine what types of household size declines are more acute in shrinking cities than other locales. We find that elderly households and households with school-aged children are under-represented in shrinking cities, while households with pre-school-aged children are over-represented. More tellingly, we find the biggest source of household-related loss in shrinking cities to be the growth of single-person households now living in houses that were once home to entire families. These findings puncture the binary on which much of the shrinking cities discourse is based. The population dynamics of most cities are subtler than either practitioners or critical scholars assert. We argue that plans and development strategies for shrinking cities should reflect a range of demographic changes, including outmigration and internal household restructuring.     

Family Arrangements and Children's Education Among Migrants: A Case Study of China

As China is experiencing an urban revolution with massive rural-to-urban migration, millions of children are profoundly affected by their parents’ migration and their decisions about family arrangements. With the discriminatory hukou system and harsh living conditions in cities, the dilemma migrant parents face is whether they should take their children with them to the city or leave them behind. This decision determines the household, school and community environments that children live in, which, in turn, shape their well-being. With a unique strategy of comparing ‘left-behind children’ to ‘migrant children’ and a gendered perspective, this article examines how different family arrangements among migrants and consequent housing conditions and gender dynamics affect children's educational well-being. Our findings demonstrate the complex impact of family arrangements on children, which is conditioned by wage income and the gender of the absent parent and the child. We find that children from less favorable socio-economic backgrounds benefit more from moving to cities. Children living with both parents and those living with their mother or grandparents tend to do better. While the effect of housing conditions is marginal, family arrangements have a gendered effect on children. Related policy recommendations are provided.     

Measuring the costs of children: parametric and semiparametric estimators1

How much additional income does a family with four children need to attain the same welfare level as a family with two children? And how much does a single person need compared to a childless couple? These questions are important in applied micro-economics and underlie public policy on, for example, social benefits and child allowances. In microeconomics, this is known as the problem of measuring equivalence scales. We estimate these scales using two types of subjective survey information. First, we use answers to survey questions on the income required to attain a given utility level. We compare the results for the usual linear model with semiparametric estimates, in which the functional form of the relationship between required income and family size and actual income is left unspecified. Second, we use answers to the question: how satisfied are you with actual household income? We present parametric and semiparametric estimates for ordered response models explaining this discrete variable. We find that according to the second type of information, costs of children are much larger than according to the first.     

How Does Childbirth Alter Intrahousehold Resource Allocation? Evidence from Japan*

Exploiting unique panel data that include direct measurements of resource allocation within households, we investigated the impact of childbirth on intrahousehold allocation for married Japanese couples. Based on a collective model of the household, we developed reduced‐form and structural‐form estimation equations that allow us to focus on private goods to track the changes in intrahousehold resource allocation. We found one additional child is associated with a reduction in the wife's private expenditure share by at least two percentage points. This may be because she substitutes more say in decisions on the children for her own private expenditure share.     

Marriage Market,Parents’ Bargaining Powers,and Children's Nutrition and Education*

Test of resource pooling and test of effect of sex ratio in the marriage market on intrahousehold resource allocation are combined to test the unitary household model. The consistency condition between the two tests is derived to test the Nash household bargaining and Pareto‐efficient household models. I examine intrahousehold resource allocation to children's nutrition and education in Indonesia. For children's nutrition, the unitary household model is rejected in favour of the non‐unitary models. The results for investment in education are mixed. The decision‐making process may differ depending on the type of decision being made.     

Targeting fertility and female participation through the income tax

We evaluate the effect of a 2003 reform in the Spanish income tax on fertility and the employment of mothers with small children. The reform introduced a tax credit for working mothers with children under the age of three, while also increasing child deductions for all households with children. Theoretically, given the interplay of these two components, the expected effect of the reform is ambiguous on both outcomes. We find that the combined reforms significantly increased both fertility (by almost 5%) and the employment rate of mothers with children under three (by 2%). These effects were more pronounced among less-educated women. In addition, to disentangle the impact of the two reform components, we use an earlier reform that increased child deductions in 1999. We find that the child deductions affect mothers' employment negatively, which implies that the 2003 tax credit would have increased employment even more (up to 5%) in the absence of the change in child deductions.     

Important Determinants of Child Labor: A Case Study for Lahore

Child labor is a persistent problem both for developing and developed countries. Academic literature holds a household responsible for this phenomenon where poverty, literacy level, and the de facto demography are considered important. A factor model is attempted in this study to investigate dynamics of child labor in a society in terms of these household characteristics. The model reveals that household‐poverty‐driven factors are the most serious while the household demography is the second most serious factor in the dynamics of child labor in Lahore. Shockingly, household literacy does not have any role to play, at least not in Lahore. The results will help policymakers to work in the domain of poverty to mitigate child labor, and also urge them to align societal factors, which shape household demography.     

Challenges of green consumption in China: a household energy use perspective

To encourage economic progress, China's government has been pushing domestic consumption as a substitute for its waning growth in investment and exports. It has also been promoting greener policies for growth, of which green consumerism is a prime component. By examining the economy through the lens of household energy consumption, this paper lays out the challenges the nation must overcome through green consumption. We explore the trends in household energy use and decompose energy used indirectly by households into six factors: changes in total population, urbanization rate, energy efficiency, interindustry input mix, household consumption preferences, and per capita household consumption level. Doing so yields insights into how progress in industrial technology, household income, urbanization, and lifestyles has affected energy use in the production of goods and services used by households. It also offers policy suggestions on how China might guide lifestyle changes to effect green consumption.     

消费率与投资率对我国城市化率的影响

从需求角度出发,运用协整、格兰杰因果检验和向量自回归模型,采用1978—2009年的时间序列数据,分析居民消费率、政府消费率及投资率对我国城市化的效应。研究结果表明:我国居民消费率、政府消费率和投资率与城市化率之间存在长期均衡关系,居民消费率对城市化率具有单向因果关系,居民消费率、政府消费率和投资率对城市化率均有正向效应。     

Unintended consequences of child care regulations

The effects of regulations governing staff-child ratio, group size, and staff qualifications in child care centers are estimated, using data on a sample of centers. The data contain measures of staff characteristics and wages, price of the service, and the developmental quality of the child care provided. Regulations vary across states, but may be endogenous to these outcomes. Estimates with state fixed effects are feasible because regulations vary within states by age group of children and job title of staff. Estimates with state fixed effects show that tougher regulations have some impact on input use, but have little or no impact on price and quality. The most striking finding is that tougher regulations reduce staff wages, suggesting that the incidence of child care regulations is on employees of day care centers.