Demography最新文献

Paid parental benefits, with individually earmarked time for mothers and fathers, aim to promote gender equality in labor force participation, wages, and childcare. The Canadian province of Québec expanded parental benefits over and above the federal policy in 2006 with the Québec Parental Insurance Plan (QPIP), which introduced paid paternity leave and lower eligibility criteria as its key features. This policy aimed to increase gender equality by encouraging fathers to use parental benefits and expanding coverage to low-income parents. Using Canadian administrative data and exploiting the policy changes in 2006 as a natural experiment, we examine the effects of Québec's extended parental benefits policy on parents' employment and earnings over 10 years after the transition to parenthood. First, we find that fathers' use of parental benefits had positive long-run effects on mothers' and fathers' earnings 8-10 years after a first birth. Second, we find that among women with low earnings before the transition to parenthood, QPIP increased the likelihood of employment 1-7 years after a first birth. This article provides the first evidence that a policy dramatically expanding parental benefits and encouraging use among both parents can have long-term positive effects on parents' labor market outcomes.

We examine whether union dissolution is associated with partners' (mis)match on political preferences, defined as self-reported closeness, intention to vote, or reported vote for a specific party. Previous studies have shown that partners' heterogamy by ethnicity, education, and other dimensions increases the risk of union dissolution because of differences between partners in lifestyles, attitudes, and beliefs or because of disapproval from family and community members. We posit that similar arguments can apply to political heterogamy and test this hypothesis using UK data from the British Household Panel Study and the UK Household Longitudinal Study. The data offer a unique opportunity to assess the role of heterogamy by political preferences while controlling for heterogamy in other domains and for other partners' characteristics over a long period (1991-2019). The data also facilitate a more specific analysis of the referendum on the United Kingdom's permanence in the European Union (known as the Brexit referendum). We find a positive association between political heterogamy and union dissolution, which is as strong as some other forms of heterogamy. The role of diverging opinions on the Brexit referendum in union dissolutions appears to be even more important than the role of partners' differing party preferences.

Although the mean U.S. ideal family size has remained relatively stable in recent years, reflecting a widespread preference for two-child families, we know very little about the strength of this preference among young adults. To examine the relative strength of preferences for family size relative to other attributes of family life, in this research note we conduct a forced-choice online conjoint survey experiment using a nationally representative sample of 1,785 U.S. women aged 18-35. We find that when family size is included as one of six attributes in a family scenario, the probability of preferring scenarios with two children is not significantly different from the probability of preferring scenarios with zero-, one-, or three-child families, net of other attributes; four-child scenarios are significantly less preferred than two-child scenarios. Evaluation of the relative magnitude of different attribute effect sizes shows that a preference for two-child scenarios is comparatively less important than preference for many of the other attributes. Our findings suggest that even if the mean ideal family size remains at or above two children in standard survey research, preferences for two-child families are surprisingly weak in hypothetical scenarios that account for competing family demands.

The number and age of kin determine the companionship and support individuals provide or receive. Over recent decades, fertility and mortality rates have changed considerably, with varying speeds across countries. We investigate the changes in kinship networks in response to time-varying demographic rates, with a focus on the speed of change. We start with stylized demographic trajectories to determine the separate effects of fertility and mortality. First, we find that differences in the number of living kin depend strongly on the speed of fertility decline. In a fast fertility transition (as in China), a 65-year-old could have 20% fewer daughters than a 70-year-old in a specific year. However, in a slow transition (as in India), this difference is only 7%. Second, the speed of fertility decline has large effects on the mean and variability of the ages of kin. Third, a cohort perspective provides valuable insight into the changes in the number and age of kin. Fourth, we show how changes in the age pattern of mortality affect kinship for individuals at different ages. We use these conclusions to examine and understand kin dynamics based on empirical demographic data from four illustrative countries (Thailand, Indonesia, Ghana, and Nigeria).

Prior research has consistently documented a more pronounced negative impact of parental separation on educational attainment among children from families with high socioeconomic status (SES). This study leverages molecular data to investigate how the parental separation penalty on educational attainment varies by SES and children's genetic propensity for education. We replicate the analysis on two distinct datasets, the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health and the Health and Retirement Study. We use parametric (ordinary least-squares and logit) and nonparametric models (LOWESS), with college attainment and years of education as the dependent variables and the mother's education as an indicator of family SES. Our results show that the parental separation penalty clusters among high-SES students with a low genetic propensity for education. For high-SES students with nonseparated parents, the probability of college attainment and completing more years of education is largely independent of their genetic propensity for education but decreases if they have a low genetic propensity for education and their parents separate. These findings suggest that when high-SES parents separate, they experience a reduced capacity to compensate for their children's low genetic propensity for education to boost college attainment and years of education.

We examine the prevalence of gender transitions in Sweden over time and document the sociodemographic characteristics of people transitioning in different periods. Using administrative data covering the transgender population from 1973 through 2020, we analyze two common events in a gender transition: the earliest diagnosis of gender incongruence and the change of legal gender. Our research note presents three main findings. First, the measured prevalence rates of diagnoses and legal gender changes are relatively low in all periods, although they have increased substantially since the early 2010s. Second, the recent increase in transition prevalence is most pronounced among people in early adulthood; in particular, young transgender men drive an increase in overall transition rates through 2018, followed by moderate declines in 2019 and 2020. Third, transgender men and women have substantially lower socioeconomic outcomes than cisgender men and women, regardless of the age at which they transition or the historical period. They are also considerably less likely to be in a legal union or reside with children. These findings highlight the continued economic and social vulnerability of the transgender population.

Recent research indicates that immigrants are more likely to experience chronic conditions and disabilities than natives at older ages, yet they continue to exhibit lower overall mortality, thus suggesting a morbidity-mortality paradox. We utilize the IPUMS National Health Interview Survey 2002-2018 with linked mortality data through 2019 (n = 405,270) to comprehensively investigate how this paradox unfolds with age for various groups of immigrants. The analysis shows that immigrants' advantages in chronic conditions and disabilities narrow or even disappear at old ages, whereas their mortality advantages continuously increase with age. These patterns exist for immigrants of different ethnoracial, sex, and educational groups. The decomposition analysis reveals that the narrowing disability gap is due to immigrants' increasing prevalence of mental illness and diabetes, shrinking advantages in lung diseases and musculoskeletal conditions, and increasing vulnerability to the disabling effects of major chronic conditions. However, immigrants are less likely to die from chronic diseases and disabilities, and this advantage strengthens with age, widening the nativity gap in mortality risk with age. We suggest that health-based selection might simultaneously postpone the onset of chronic diseases and disabilities to later ages for immigrants and better enable them to weather the mortality consequences of the diseases and disabilities.

Over the past few decades, U.S. cities have changed dramatically, largely because of two major trends: the fall of violence and the rise of urban inequality. Despite the attention given to each of these trends, little research has assessed how they are related to each other. This study is the first to generate causal evidence on the impact of violent crime on economic residential segregation. We document the effect of the crime drop on economic segregation in 500 U.S. cities between 1990 and 2010, using exogenous shocks to city crime rates to identify causal effects. We find that declining violent and property crime reduced low-income household segregation but had no effect on affluent households. Our findings indicate that the crime decline has not overturned the trend toward rising economic segregation but has slowed its pace. Additional analyses suggest that declining crime reduced low-income household segregation by drawing more White and college-educated residents to the poorest neighborhoods of 1990. We also find suggestive evidence that declining violence led poor households to migrate out of low-income neighborhoods, reflecting a pattern of gentrification. Descriptive analyses of tract-level data from five cities show that neighborhoods with sharper declines in violence became less socioeconomically disadvantaged. Despite continued rising economic inequality, the crime decline has had its greatest impact on concentrated poverty, long seen as one of the most harmful dimensions of urban inequality.

Parenting styles are often the focus of interventions aimed at mitigating disparities in children's well-being. Although research has sought to establish parenting differences across income groups, the extent to which income itself drives such differences is disputed. Little attention has focused on income volatility, despite its secular rise and recent salience and the links between volatility and parenting drawn by theories across the social and developmental sciences. I investigate whether and how income volatility affects parenting styles using data from the 2009-2022 UK Household Longitudinal Study and an empirical approach that addresses measured and unmeasured common causes of volatility and parenting. Self-reports of parenting styles are differently associated with income instability across income groups. Mothers with higher but more unstable household and labor incomes report lower warmth. When households accumulate benefit income, reports of harsh or more permissive practices become more frequent among mothers with higher incomes and less frequent among those with lower incomes. Despite instability due to labor income losses, fathers with lower incomes report higher warmth in their interactions with their children, whereas fathers with higher incomes report the opposite. These findings suggest that theories, public debates, and policies could be retailored to address the role of income changes in family life.

The forced return of migrants is an important part of migration policy toolkits. An increased risk of deportation, politicians argue, will deter subsequent irregular migration. We explore this argument for the case of forced removals from the United States and find that rather than operating as a deterrent for future migrants, this policy had a boomerang effect. The forced return of migrants with a track record of crime generated negative externalities in the form of higher violence in their countries of origin, counteracting the deterrence effect of higher deportation risk. We apply mediation analysis to a panel of Latin American and Caribbean countries and decompose the effect of deportations on emigration into three coefficients of interest: a total effect of deportations on later emigration, an effect of deportations on the mediator variable of violence, and an effect of violence on emigration. We address the endogeneity of our key explanatory variables-deportations and violence-using migrants' exposure to the unequal and staggered implementation of policies intended to facilitate deportations at the level of U.S. states as a source of exogenous variation. We show that migration intentions and asylum requests increase in response to deportation threats. This effect is mediated through increased violence and is strongly driven by dynamics in Central America. Although the total number of apprehensions at the U.S. southern border in response to deportation threats does not show a clear pattern, we observe an increase in the share of unaccompanied minors and the share of entire family units among those apprehended, suggesting a shift in migration strategies and composition.