Intergeneration
Child Penalties and Parental Role Models: Classroom Exposure Effects
Henrik Kleven, Giulia Olivero & Eleonora Patacchini
NBER Working Paper, September 2024
Abstract:
This paper investigates whether the effects of children on the labor market outcomes of women relative to men -- child penalties -- are shaped by the work behavior of peers' parents during adolescence. Leveraging quasi-random variation in the fraction of peers with working parents across cohorts within schools, we find that greater exposure to working mothers during adolescence substantially reduces the child penalty in employment later in life. Conversely, we find that greater exposure to working fathers increases the penalty. Our findings suggest that parental role models during adolescence are critical for shaping child-related gender gaps in the labor market.
Intergenerational Transmission of Occupation: Lessons from the United States Army
Kyle Greenberg et al.
NBER Working Paper, September 2024
Abstract:
This paper estimates causal intergenerational occupation transmission in the military using discontinuities in parents' eligibility for service from the Armed Forces Qualification Test. A parent's enlistment in the Army increases their children's military service propensity by between 58% and 110%. Intergenerational occupational transmission rates vary by race and sex---they are highest for demographic groups whose parents gained the most economically from service and for same-sex parent-child pairs. Our findings provide new evidence on the mechanisms driving intergenerational occupation correlations and show that intergenerational transmission is an important channel for getting under-represented groups into high-quality occupations.
Estimating the Effect of a Universal Cash Transfer on Birth Outcomes
Kiara Wyndham-Douds & Sarah Cowan
American Sociological Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Babies in the United States fare worse than their peers in other high-income countries, and their well-being is starkly unequal along socioeconomic and racialized lines. Newborn health predicts adult well-being, making these inequalities consequential. Policymakers and scholars seeking to improve newborn health and reduce inequality have recently looked to direct cash transfers as a viable intervention. We examine the only unconditional cash transfer in the United States, the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD), to learn if giving pregnant people money improves their newborns' health. Alaska has paid its residents a significant dividend annually since 1982. The dividend's size varies yearly and is exogenous to Alaskans and the local economy, permitting us to make causal claims. After accounting for fertility selection, we find that receiving cash during pregnancy has no meaningful effect on newborn health. Current theory focuses on purchasing power and status mechanisms to delineate how money translates into health. It cannot illuminate this null finding. This case illustrates a weakness with current theory: it does not provide clear expectations for interventions. We propose four components that must be considered in tandem to predict whether proposed interventions will work.
Explaining the Sharp Decline in Birth Rates in Canada and the USA in 2020
Amit Sawant & Mats Stensrud
American Journal of Epidemiology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Birth rates in Canada and the USA declined sharply in March 2020 and deviated from historical trends. This decline was absent in similarly developed European countries. We argue that the selective decline was driven by incoming individuals, who would have travelled from abroad and given birth in Canada and the USA, had there been no travel restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, by leveraging data from periods before and during the COVID-19 travel restrictions, we quantified the extent of births by incoming individuals. In an interrupted time series analysis, the expected number of such births in Canada was 970 per month (95% CI: 710-1,200), which is 3.2% of all births in the country. The corresponding estimate for the USA was 6,700 per month (95% CI: 3,400-10,000), which is 2.2% of all births. A secondary difference-in-differences analysis gave similar estimates at 2.8% and 3.4% for Canada and the USA, respectively. Our study reveals the extent of births by recent international arrivals, which hitherto has been unknown and infeasible to study.
Roe v. Wade and sex balancing
Yichu Li
Economics Letters, November 2024
Abstract:
I provide evidence that abortion is used for gender balancing. The probability of the first two children being the same sex decreased immediately after Roe v. Wade. This crowded out the practice of having additional children to achieve gender diversity.