Economics of the family

In this paper, I test whether highly educated women in India are now choosing marriage partners who are “equals” in terms of educational and professional achievements rather than choosing partners primarily based on caste. The underlying research questions are - (i) Are the marriage preferences different across highly educated women from different time cohorts? (ii) Are the marriage preferences different across highly educated women from different economic classes? (iii) Are the marriage preferences different across highly educated women from the same cohort depending on whether they are formally employed or not? (iv) Is caste playing a less significant role in marital matching for the newer generation of educated Indian women? Or are their multiple gradients of preferences, that is, marry an “equal” but within the same caste? I use data from the India Human Development Survey, 2005. To operationalize equal educational and professional standing, I will match the education levels, occupation codes, and wage levels. Of course, a perfect match (doctors only marrying doctors) is not expected. However, broad occupational matching such as professionals or managers and similar wage levels is expected. I expect to observe a diminishing gap in husbands’ and wives’ education and employment outcomes across cohorts of highly educated women.

In this paper I study the effect of women’s bargaining power within family on nutritional outcome of children in India. Malnutrition has important bearing on human development and consequently economic development of a country and it is a serious concern for India. Several studies find little or limited impact of economic growth at the state level or the share of public expenditure on nutrition and health on child malnutrition in India. On the other hand, there is now growing empirical evidence from other developing countries on the positive effect of women’s bargaining power within family, on child malnutrition. Using data from the Demographic and Health Survey I examine whether women’s bargaining power at the household level has an additional explanatory power over state level per capita income and public intervention and how the bargaining power interacts with these factors. I expect to find that once we control for family level bargaining, we will see significant effect of both economic growth and public intervention on child nutritional outcome.

This research project focuses on socio-demographic factors and the structure of family intergenerational transfers. It was used methods of descriptive statistic and modeles of binary choice to identify the features of the behavior of Russian households in the field of family intergenerational transfers, depending on the socio-demographic characteristics of people.

This research tries to examine the nature of two sets of changes, demographic and spatial, and searches for linkages between them, and the potential economic explanation behind. All of this will be related to the largest metropolitan areas of Mexico, and its comparison with the changes in the national context. First, it outlines the main features of the changing in population and demographic regime in Mexico and in the main cities, especially the first demographic transition, or the transit for high to low rates of mortality and fertility, and the so-called second demographic transition, or a more elderly population, and with a larger variety of household types. Secondly, it attempts to identify how recent demographic developments relate with two changes at intra-urban level: i) household types, or household segregation, and ii) residential choice, or the demand for housing. Thirdly, the family economic approach will be use for offering potential explanations to these demographic and spatial changes in the largest cities of Mexico.

Anticipating changes in the number, size and composition of households are an important element of many issues of social concern. To fulfil the objectives, three rounds of National Family Health Survey conducted in 1992-1993, 1998-1999 and 2005-2006 have been used. Over the time period there has been decline in the household size from 1992-1993 to 2005-2006. Different dimensions of household size and composition have been studied by considering size of the household, age composition, members’ relationship to head, household complexity, sex of head and household structure as well as association between household size and structure. The second part of the paper depicts that household size is lower in urban areas than in rural areas. Eventually it can be stated that number of children in the household has negative relation whereas number of adults in the household has positive relation with the wealth quintiles.

The United States is still in the midst of the worst economic climate since the Great Depression. Impacts have not been uniform across demographic groups, however, with important differences by age. While there is much research already about the age impacts of the Great Recession, it largely focuses on just one particular age group or just one aspect of economic life. To get a complete understanding of the generational nature of the Great Recession requires more comprehensive tools. The National Transfer Accounts (NTA) framework provides a more complete perspective, allowing us to examine the age dimension of production, consumption, transfers, and saving. In this paper, I will show age profiles of all of these economic activities for the full age range, from pre-recession years through 2011. The results indicate that all ages have been hurt by the recession, but to different degrees. The coping mechanisms employed to deal with these difficulties have also varied significantly by age and socioeconomic status.

Background: Socio-economic determinants of health-seeking behaviour remain unexplored among poor families in middle-income countries.
Objective: To examine socio-economic determinants of health-seeking behaviour for children under 5-years with diarrhoea or cough from rural Egyptian families, by developing a comprehensive measurement of socio-economic position (SEP) encompassing parental education and occupation, dwelling characteristics and household assets.
Methods: Latent variable modelling to construct SEP. Multivariate logistic regression of SEP and progression in three consecutive steps of health-seeking behaviour for each disease, with attention to child gender and age.
Findings: A third of children had diarrhoea and two thirds cough in the preceding month. More than 80% of children with either symptom received care, of which more than half was from private providers. Male gender was associated with higher likelihood of seeking care for cough and with higher expenses for care in both illnesses. No single component of SEP determined progression in three steps of health-seeking behaviours. Further examination of association with latent SEP is required.
Conclusion: Understanding the association between SEP and health-seeking behaviours among poor families is crucial to designing policy to reduce socio-economic gradient.

I use a novel experiment to study intra-household allocation of resources in rural northern Ghana. In an experiment that provided subsidies towards the purchase of health insurance, the total value of the subsidies were not enough to enroll all household members. 200 households were randomly assigned to receive no subsidy vouchers, subsidy vouchers that specified a subsidy amount for each household member or a subsidy voucher that allowed households to decide which members to enroll to allocate. Comparison of enrollment patterns under the two types of vouchers shows that when allowed to allocate subsidy amounts, households enroll more boys than girls by 11.7 percentage points. This gender differential is concentrated in children aged 7-17 years. I find suggestive evidence that differential labor market participation rates is one explanation for this allocation pattern: among children aged 7-17 years, boys are 3.7 percentages points more likely to participate in the labor market as farm workers. These results suggest that households may be investing more in boys because of their contributions to household farm output.

Financial literacy is the ability to understand finance, where one has the awareness, knowledge and skills to make decisions about savings, investments, borrowings and expenditure in an informed manner. Thus, this present paper, the financial literates refer to those women who have a bank saving account, have knowledge on loan programs in a bank, and have any knowledge of health insurance. It has hypothesized that those financially literates are more likely to utilize various health care services than the non-financial literates especially maternal health. Therefore fore, an attempt has been made to study the financial literacy and their utilization for govt. or private health care services for ANC. Uni-variate, bi-variate analysis and multivariate analysis were done for the study. The Northern region women belonging to the Muslim religion community who are residing in urban areas are more likely to be financially illiterate than those of women from the Southern region from belonging to the Hindus, Christians and other religious group who are residing in an urban areas. Financially literates were more likely to visit any healthcare services than the financially illiterates. Financial illiterates were more likely to utilize government health care while the financial literates tend to use the private health care systems.

It is indicated that one of the major factors that make the difference between reality and desire for a large number of children in Japan is mothers’ employment, after controlling for demographic factors. Few studies have examined the relationship between mothers’ employment and the number of children in terms of the expenditure of child-rearing with the impact of macro factors such as government policy taken into consideration.
　
This paper aims to conduct a cross-national analysis of the impact of these macro factors on the relationship between mothers’ employment and the expenditure of child-rearing, using micro data from five developed countries.

A multiple regression analysis was conducted using pooled data from five countries as a preliminary analysis. Consequently, we found that child-rearing expenditure was the lowest in France regardless of the youngest child’s age and mother’s employment. In the U.S.A, Japan and Korea, the expenditure of rearing older children was higher when mothers were in paid employment. We will conduct further analysis to investigate the factors causing these results, taking account of the macro context such as the difference between countries in terms of tax systems, childcare services, education expenses in household budgets and price level.