Social class and the fertility transition: a critical comment on the statistical results reported in Simon Szreter's Fertility,class and gender in Britain, 1860–19401

Simon Szreter's book Fertility, class and gender in Britain, 1860–1940 argues that social and economic class fails to explain the cross‐sectional differences in marital fertility as reported in the 1911 census of England and Wales. Szreter's conclusion made the book immediately influential, and it remains so. This finding matters a great deal for debates about the causes of the European fertility decline of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For decades scholars have argued whether the main forces at work were ideational or social and economic. This note reports a simple graphical and statistical re‐analysis of Szreter's own data. We show that social class does explain cross‐sectional differences in English marital fertility in 1911.     

Social class, social mobility and mortality in the Netherlands, 1850–2004

This study uses data from a random sample of births in the Netherlands during the period 1850–1922 to examine the relationships between social class, social mobility and mortality at middle and old age. Population registers and personal cards covering the period from 1850 to 2004 for all Dutch provinces were used to reconstruct individual life histories of 14,900 births. For men we did not find an effect of the social class of origin (using two different SES-classifications) on mortality in age group 18 to 35. We also did not observe an effect of own social class on mortality after age 35. For women effects of social class of origin and social class of husband were generally absent as well. Our conclusion is that the standard ideas about the negative effects of processes of industrialization and urbanization on the duration of life do not seem to apply to the Netherlands. Where one lived mattered more for survival than the social class one belonged to.     

北京工商大学 传承历史 科学发展 不断提升服务区域行业经济社会发展能力

中国高等教育经过30年的改革与发展，取得了历史性突破，已经由精英教育阶段进入到大众化教育阶段。与此同时，高等教育与经济社会发展一体化进程也在加速，对高等学校进一步明确办学定位、服务面向定位提出了新的要求。北京高等院校林立，其中不乏中外知名的综合性、     

Longevity,Fertility, and the Real Exchange Rate

We build a simple overlapping generation model to investigate the effect of life expectancy on the real exchange rate where fertility is chosen endogenously. The model reveals that, although the overall effect of life expectancy on the real exchange rate is not certain, longer life expectancy tends to cause the real exchange rate to depreciate by reducing fertility. Fertility thus serves as a mediator in the effect of life expectancy on the real exchange rate. Evidence from 148 economies (1980–2018) shows a statistically significant and robust negative relationship between life expectancy and the real exchange rate. It is estimated that a 1 year increase in life expectancy is associated with a 1.5 percent depreciation in the real exchange rate. The evidence also confirms the mediated effect of fertility. The mediated effect that fertility exerts accounts for 30 percent to 50 percent of the total effect, depending on the real exchange rate index used.     

A model of trade,task offshoring and social insurance

The purpose of this paper is to study the role of social insurance design in a comparative-advantage model of offshoring and trade. To do so, we incorporate social insurance into a modified version of the Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg (Am Econ Rev 98(5):1978–1997, 2008) model by formalizing its administrative, compensation, cost, labor-supply and productivity effects. The compensation and productivity effects, which are novel, give rise to important offshoring and trade implications that can contribute to explain how social insurance provision can be sustained under globalization pressure and why similar globalization pressure can lead to different skill premia developments in Western economies.     

Financial systems, risk management, and entrepreneurship: historical perspectives

Economic historians find that the most successful economies of history tend to be ones that early in their modern histories developed sophisticated financial systems that subsequently sustained their development and growth. Financial economists are finding the same association of financial development and growth across a wider range of countries and levels of economic development in recent decades. This essay argues that more sophisticated financial systems not only mobilize more capital and allocate capital more efficiently than do less developed systems. By offering more sophisticated methods of managing and reducing risks than primitive financial systems, modern financial systems, perhaps paradoxically, also promote higher levels of risk taking and entrepreneurship.     

On the explanation of schooling,occupation and earnings: Some alternative path analyses

Summary Jencks's well-known sociological path analysis connecting parental socio-economic characteristics and some ability measure of the person investigated with his or her schooling, occupation and income is available for the United States, Sweden and the Netherlands in various versions. For the United Kingdom the analysis has now been applied to the new General Household Survey, supplying over 5000 observations. This article compares the various results and offers a few alternative models, using the American and British data. These alternatives do not offer, in the British case, improvements in variance explained. Moreover, most regression coefficients show wide variations between countries. A suggestion for improvement is derived from a recent study using at least three occupation characteristics.We are grateful to the British Office of Population Census and Surveys for making available to us the data from which the UK results reported in this article were obtained.     

Fertility,income distribution,and economic growth: theory and cross-country evidence

The authors perform discriminatory, empirical tests of a theoretical model that predicts that family size adversely affects output per capita and nonsteady state growth rates. Neoclassical models posit that adverse output and nonsteady growth rates are affected by labor force growth (LFG) or population growth (PG). This study tests whether family size (FS) will be more significant than LFG or PG in explaining differences in economic growth (EG) rates across countries during 1960-88. A proxy variable for the public education system was used to separate government interventions on human capital formation from market forces. Data were obtained for 73 countries, which exclude centrally planned economies, oil-producing countries, and those with less than 1 million population. The empirical test is run with 58-country, 45-country, and 96-country samples to test for robustness and reliability. The empirical test supports the theoretical model. It demonstrates that equal distribution of income and smaller FS enhance EG. With income inequality, the effect of FS was significant, and the effect of the LFG rate or PG rate was insignificant. With a given FS, LFG was positively correlated with EG. A reduction of the net fertility rate by one point would increase the worker output growth rate by 0.25%, and the differences in growth rates between high- and low-fertility countries would be 1%. An increase in the income share of the bottom 60% would increase the growth rate of worker output by about 1%. Higher investments in public or private education would be conducive to growth.     

Urban agriculture,gender and empowerment: An alternative view

Studies of urban agriculture (UA) in South Africa, and more broadly in southern Africa, have drawn on quantitative research methodologies to explain the involvement in UA of people from low-income households. Such studies tend to explain UA with reference to the direct economic and monetary gains that are made through agricultural activity. In Cape Town, the contribution of UA to income generation and expenditure substitution is limited. However, UA is important to women of low-income households in ways less directly related to monetary gain. Women use UA in processes of empowerment, to establish social networks, to symbolise a sense of security and to encourage community development. Policy-makers should extend their perception of UA's benefits beyond narrow economistic notions to include these positive social effects.     

Development and gender: Longitudinal entrepreneurial gender effects of the inner-city Johannesburg street-trading context

An empirical investigation was undertaken into entrepreneurial gender effects within the inner-city street-trading context of Johannesburg, a large South African city. A cross-sectional non-parametric quantitative research design was applied in each of three consecutive years, 2008, 2009 and 2010, and a longitudinal investigation was enabled. Differences in earnings, rental stand operation, and the effects of specific and general human capital by gender were tested using non-parametric Kruskal–Wallis methods. Further testing of the non-parametric associations of each factor by gender was undertaken using non-parametric Spearman rho and Kendall tau measures. Male traders are found to earn more. However, a return on specific and general human capital is found for female traders. Security threats in this context might have a disproportionate effect on female street traders, and most specifically on female street traders of foreign origin.     

Fertility,income distribution and economic growth: theory and cross-country evidence: comments

In a recent paper, Galor and Zang attempt to explain the large observed cross-country disparities in the levels and growth rates of per capita output. Cross-country variation in family size and income distribution patterns are an important element of such an explanation. Galor and Zang support the arguments put forth in their paper by using a simple variation of the model published by Galor and Zeira in 1993 and 70 cross-sectional growth regressions in the style of Barro's 1991 work. Some points in Galor and Zang's recent work require clarification. The author therefore reviews their work with the goal of clarifying some of Galor and Zang's underlying assumptions which are not that clear in their paper. The aim is to give the reader an idea of what Galor and Zang's paper does and does not do.     

Occupational assignment,hiring discrimination,and the gender pay gap

An identified, structural demand-wage equation is estimated using endogenous indicators for working part-time and occupational assignment. The wage equation is estimated by two-stage and ordinary least squares, and the pay gap is decomposed into explained and residual parts. Measures of gender-based wage discrimination are estimated after making adjustments to account for hiring discrimination and occupational preferences. The evidence indicates that gender differences in preferences for occupation explain much of the gap, yet there is still evidence of hiring discrimination. As a percentage of male wages, the discriminatory gap adjusted for hiring discrimination lies between 10.5 and 13.5 percent when estimated by ordinary least squares, and between 2.2 and 5.4 percent when estimated by two-stage least squares.     

Economic efficiency and social stability: A stylized short-run price reform model

A stylized model is developed to focus on evaluating the economic efficiency and social stability issues related to price reform in the short run from a policymaker's point of view. Different interesting special cases are studied. Comparative static results show when the pace of the price reform should be faster or slower and when the subsidy should be larger, smaller, or zero.     

Remittances,social security,and the crowding-out effect: Evidence from Vietnam

In the absence of adequate social security systems, many people in developing countries, especially the poor and vulnerable, cope through migration-related remittances. However, when remittances, internal or international, provide social benefits similar to public transfers they may overlap: ‘crowding-out’ effects occur. Employing three long-sample Vietnam Household Living Standard surveys undertaken during the 2000s, this paper studies the crowding-out effects of remittances in Vietnam, a developing country that has experienced a soaring inflow of remittances since 2000. Significant crowding-out effects for both domestic and international remittances on income are found below the poverty line in Vietnam, consistent with an altruistic motive. Beyond this, transfer derivatives are positive and statistically significant in both areas, suggesting a switch of motives from altruism to exchange at the poverty line. The substituting relationship between public transfers and remittances observed for the rural poor reveals key challenges to delivering an equal and efficient social security system in the country.     

Transition on the spot: Historicity, social structure, and institutional change

Why do some countries in transition perform quite well while others still struggle with institutional reform, experiencing economic hardship and political disintegration? This paper suggests that this question can only be answered if the processes behind institutional change are well understood. Within the framework of a micro-macro model, it will be argued that historic experience shapes both mental models and the effectiveness of social learning. The historicity of economic development is behind differing development paths. Moreover, it will be shown that understanding the forces that bring about institutional change allows the political advisor to suggest strategies better adapted to the specific needs of different countries than the strategies currently employed. These findings will be applied to the problem of institutional change in rural Russia where the failure of existing reform strategies is eminent.