Fertility and Parental Labor Supply in Rural Northwestern China: Evidence From Twin Births

When China's leaders launched rural reforms in the late 1970s, they acknowledged the nation's need to modify its commitment to egalitarianism.1 Slogans such as Tt is glorious to be rich!' and 'Some areas will lead; others will follow!' signalled this fundamental shift in ideology. Leaders backed up these exhortations with a series of concrete policy actions ? establishing the Special Economic Zones and implementing the East Coast-first policy, introducing financial reforms, and initiating the rural industrialization movement. In China's version of the 'trickle down' theory, certain core areas were to take the lead in the modernization process and provide models for other areas to later emulate. Adopting strategies that had been employed

In recent years, Congress has considered a variety of work-subsidy programs designed to encourage work among welfare recipients. Many of these programs would subsidize individuals only if they work some minimum number of hours. Commonly used techniques cannot give direct answers to relevant policy questions since a tied offer is involved, and hence the offer cannot be treated as a simple wage change. The essence of the problem involves utility comparisons between two or more discrete alternatives. Such comparisons inherently require information about consumer preferences in a way not easily obtained from ordinary labor-supply functions. To make such comparisons, I present a method for directly estimating consumer indifference surfaces between money income and nonmarket time. Once these surfaces are determined, they can be used to compare a variety of alternative programs to investigate whether or not there is scope for Pareto-optimal redistribution of income transfers and time, improving the general level of welfare of the community at large without reducing the welfare of individuals receiving income transfers. Knowledge of these indifference surfaces allows us to estimate reservation wages to estimate the value of nonworking-women's time (Gronau 1973), laborforce participation functions, hours-of-work functions, and welfare losses due to income tax programs (Harberger 1964). I demonstrate that direct estimation of indifference surfaces allows us, at least in principle, to relax

Fertility, household structure, and parental labor supply: Evidence from China

This paper tests the effects of fertility on household structure and parental labor supply in rural China. To solve the endogeneity problem, we use a unique survey on households with twin children and a comparison group of non-twin households. The ordinary least squares estimates show a negative correlation between fertility and parental labor supply. Using twinning as a natural experiment, we do not find evidence on the negative effects of fertility on parental labor supply. By contrast, we find that the twinning-induced increase in fertility enhances significantly the coresidence of grandparents. The results remain robust when we use the Chinese 1990 population census. We suggest that the negative effects of fertility on parental labor supply are mitigated by the childcare provided by grandparents. Our results have important implications for population and public childcare policies.

This article examines changes in parental labor supply in response to the unanticipated closure of schools following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. The authors collect detailed daily information on school closures at the school-district level, which they merge to individual-level data on labor supply and sociodemographic characteristics from the monthly Current Population Survey spanning from January 2019 through May 2020. Using a difference-in-differences estimation approach, the authors find evidence of non-negligible labor supply reductions. Having a partner at home helped offset the negative effect of school closures, particularly for maternal employment, although respondents' job traits played a more significant role in shaping labor supply responses to school closures. Overall, the labor supply impacts of school closures prove robust to identification checks and to controlling for other coexistent social distancing measures. In addition, these early school closures seem to have had a long-lasting negative impact on parental labor supply.

We study the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on the labor supply of parents with young children. Using the monthly Current Population Survey, and following a pre-analysis plan, we use three variations of difference-in-differences to compare workers with childcare needs to those without. The first compares parents with young children and those without young children, while the second and third rely on the presence of someone who could provide childcare in the household: a teenager in one and a grandparent in the other. We analyze three outcomes: whether parents were “at work” (not sick, on vacation, or otherwise away from his or her job); whether they were employed; and hours worked. Contrary to expectation, we find the labor supply of parents with young children was not negatively affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, some evidence suggests they were more likely to be working after the pandemic unfolded. For the outcomes of being at work and employed, our results are not systematically different for men and women, but some findings suggest women with young children worked almost an hour longer per week than those without. These results suggest that factors like employers allowing employees to work at home and informal sources of childcare aided parents in avoiding negative shocks to their labor supply during the pandemic.

BackgroundMaternal health during pregnancy is a key input in fetal health and child development. This study aims to systematically describe the health behaviors of pregnant women in rural China and identify which subgroups of women are more likely to engage in unhealthy behaviors during pregnancy.MethodsWe surveyed 1088 pregnant women in rural northwestern China on exposure to unhealthy substances, nutritional behaviors, the timing and frequency of antenatal care, and demographic characteristics.ResultsPregnant women were active in seeking antenatal care and had low rates of alcohol consumption (5.1%), exposure to toxins (4.8%), and exposure to radiation (2.9%). However, tobacco exposure was widespread (40.3%), as was low dietary diversity (61.8%), unhealthy weight gain (59.7%), unhealthy pre-pregnancy BMI (29.7%), and no folic acid intake (17.1%). Maternal education is closely linked to better health behaviors, whereas experience with a previous pregnancy is not.ConclusionsTobacco exposure and unhealthy nutritional behaviors are common among pregnant women in rural northwestern China. The findings indicate that in the absence of professional health information, relying on experience of previous pregnancies alone may not help rural women avoid unhealthy maternal behaviors. Maternal health education campaigns targeting nutrition and tobacco exposure during pregnancy may improve maternal, fetal, and child health in rural China.

In rural north-western China, the tension between economic growth and ecological crises demonstrates the limitations of dominant top-down approaches to water management. In the 1990s, the Chinese government adopted the Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) approach to combat the degradation of water and ecological systems throughout its rural regions. While the approach has had some success at reducing desertification, water shortage, and ecological deterioration, there are important limitations and obstacles that continue to impede optimum outcomes in water management. As the current IWRM approach is instituted through a top-down centralized bureaucratic structure, it often fails to address the socio-political context in which water management is embedded and therefore lacks a complete treatment of how power is embedded in the bureaucracy and how it articulates through economic growth imperatives set by the Chinese state. The approach has relied on infrastructure heavy and technocratic solutions to govern water demand, which has worked to undermine the focus on integration and public participation. Finally, the historical process through which water management mechanisms have been instituted are fraught with bureaucratic fragmentation and processes of centralization that work against some of its primary goals such as reducing uncertainty and risk in water management systems. This article reveals the historical, social, political, and economic processes behind these shortcomings in water management in rural northwestern China by focusing on the limitations of a top-down approach that rely on infrastructure, technology, and quantification, and thereby advances a more holistic, socio-political perspective for water management that considers the state-society dynamics inherent in water governance in rural China.

In rural northwestern China, the tension between economic growth and ecological crises demonstrate the limitations of dominant top-down approaches to water management. In the 1990’s, the Chinese government adopted the Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) approach to combat the degradation of water and ecological systems throughout its rural regions. While the approach has had some success at reducing desertification, water shortage, and ecological deterioration, there are important limitations and obstacles that continue to impede optimum outcomes in water management. As the current IWRM approach is instituted through a top-down centralized bureaucratic structure, it often fails to address the socio-political context in which water management is embedded and therefore lacks a complete treatment of how power is embedded in the bureaucracy and how it articulates through economic growth imperatives set by the Chinese state. The approach has relied on infrastructure-heavy and technocratic solutions to govern water demand, which has worked to undermine the focus on integration and public participation. Finally, the historical process through which water management mechanisms have been instituted is fraught with bureaucratic fragmentation and processes of centralization that work against some of its primary goals such as reducing uncertainty and risk in water management systems. This article reveals the historical, social, political, and economic processes behind these shortcomings in water management in rural northwestern China by focusing on the limitations of a top-down approach that rely on infrastructure, technology, and quantification, and thereby advances a more holistic, socio-political perspective for water management that considers the state-society dynamics inherent in water governance in rural China.

This study explores the potential impact of school closures on in-person learning and parents’ labor supply in terms of paid employment and hours of work. Using a probit model, it finds that regardless of educational attainment, women with school-age children face a lower probability of being on paid employment, but the same cannot be observed among men with school-age children. The Heckman model was applied to estimate the log of hours of work. Conditional on employment, it was observed that school closures do not significantly determine the log of hours of work for both men and women with school-age children. However, further disaggregating the estimates by education reveals that female college graduates—and, to some extent, male college graduates—with school-age children tend to work more hours during school closures. In contrast, school closures do not affect the work hours of less educated men and women with children. Overall, the results suggest that school closures have a negative effect on employment at the extensive margin for women, but there is no evidence of reduced labor supply at the intensive margins. Policies aimed at preserving employment and mitigating human capital deterioration can thus address the cost of school closures on women’s labor supply.

This study examines the effect of the presence of a "mother substitute" in the household on urban womens participation in the labor force and fertility in Mexico in 1982. Data were obtained from the 1982 Mexican National Demographic Survey on reproductive history educational status employment status and household structure for a subsample of 2746 urban women who were married (90%) or in a consensual union (10%) and had had a child within the prior 5 years. Theoretically women with higher value of market time lower household income and lower value of nonmarket time will more likely be working women. Women had 3.4 surviving children 83% used contraceptives and 15% were employed. Analysis involved use of reduced form equations to model the joint determination of labor force participation and fertility; justification of this method is given. Husbands education was a proxy for income level. Cost of child rearing is figured as the mothers number of children >5 years and household structure. "Mother substitute" was an additional unemployed female aged >13 years. An imputed wage for all women in the sample is used to measure the value of time in the labor force. Probit regression estimation methods revealed that mothers were more likely to be working when their wage offers were higher. Those with a caretaker in the household and with a less well-educated husband are also more likely to work. Those more likely to be employed also had few children 6-12 years and more children >13 years. In the fully reduced form of the equation determinants of the wage offer (education age region) were substituted for the instrumental variable; the results were consistent. An additional woman in the household was significantly positively related to the likelihood of women working. In the reduced form fertility equation women who were younger better educated with more children and with better educated partners were less likely to have more than 1 child born within the last 5 years. The implication from the negative coefficient of the household-structure variable is that women with additional caretakers are less likely to have more than 1 young child. The causes are explained. Mother substitutes increase the likelihood of working women and do not increase the likelihood of having more children particularly among nonemployed mothers which differs from US results. Future research should refine the measure of mother substitute and account for her presence in the household.

In this study I explore effects of adoption of the four-day school week policy, a permanent reduction in annual days of schooling, on parental labor supply and related outcomes. Using a difference-in-differences empirical model, I estimate causal effects of four-day school week adoption on parental employment, hours worked, weeks worked, earnings, and location choice across four states—CO, ID, OK, OR—with large increases in the use of the policy in the last decade. Estimates indicate that, among mothers with children all between ages 5 and 13, increasing four-day week enrollment from zero to 25% of an area’s students causes an 11% decrease in employment (7.6 percentage points) and decreases of a similar magnitude in hours and weeks worked, and the probability of reporting any wage or salary income, relative to baseline levels. In contrast to these estimates, among single mothers I find no negative employment effects and also find that the policy led to an 18% increase in the incidence of working year-round relative to working fewer weeks per year. The labor supply of married fathers was not affected by adoption of the four-day school week in a statistically significant manner. Finally, I estimate small but precise increases in moving in response to the policy in subsequent years and show that there is significant heterogeneity in labor supply responses among married mothers according to educational level, with most of the negative effects accruing to mothers with a four-year college degree or greater.

We examine how means-tested childcare subsidies affect parental labor supply. Using the introduction of reduced childcare prices for low-income families in Norway in 2015, we show that these subsidies may have the unintended effect of discouraging work rather than promoting employment. First, structural labor supply simulations suggest that a negative parental labor supply effect dominates, ex ante. Ex post, we find a small and insignificant effect of means-tested childcare subsidies on parental labor supply in the reform year. We find no statistically significant bunching around the income limits in subsequent years, but we do find negative labor supply effects in subsequent expansions of the reform. Our results suggest that in a context where both parental employment and participation in formal childcare are high, means-tested childcare subsidies may have unintended parental labor supply effects.

Epilepsy treatment gap and its associated factors in individuals aged 65 years and older with active convulsive epilepsy in rural Northwestern China.

Better nutrition, healthier mind? Experimental evidence from primary schools in rural northwestern China