Socioeconomic Disadvantage and Early Childbearing

We examine the empirical relationship between socioeconomic disadvantage and rates of early childbearing. First, we use data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to confirm a strong correlation at the individual level - women who grow up "disadvantaged" are much more likely to give birth as teens. Then we aggregate Vital Statistics microdata from 1968 through 2003 to conduct a cohort-based analysis of the relationship between rates of socioeconomic disadvantage of a birth cohort and the cohort's subsequent early childbearing experiences. Our cohort level analysis implies an even tighter intergenerational correlation between rates of background disadvantage and early childbearing. But, when our analysis econometrically controls for fixed state and year of birth effects in the model to account for cultural and other differences across cohorts, the relationship between rates of disadvantage and early childbearing is found to be quite modest. For example, the elasticity of early childbearing rates by age 18 with respect to the probability of being born to a mother under age 18 is only 0.05. This suggests that broader, societal forces are far more important in determining rates of early childbearing than rates of socioeconomic disadvantage per se.

The growing difference in college attainment between women and men

Workers with more education typically earn more than those with less education, and the difference has been growing in recent decades. Not surprisingly, the percentage of the population going after and getting a college degree has been rising as well. Since the late 1970s, though, the increase in college attainment has stalled for men and gathered steam for women. Among college-age individuals, more women now graduate than men. Changes in labor market incentives appear to explain the increased investment in education made by women. But men’s investments in education have been much less responsive to the same incentivesEducation ; Women - Education

Explaining Inequality the World Round: Cohort Size, Kuznets Curves, andOpenness

Klaus Deininger and Lyn Squire have recently produced an inequality data base for a panel of countries from the 1960s to the 1990s. We use these data to decompose the sources of inequality into three central parts: the demographic or cohort size effect; the so-called Kuznets Curve or demand effects; and the commitment to globalization or policy effects. We also control for education supply, the so-called natural resource curse and other variables suggested by the literature. While the Kuznets Curve comes out of hiding when the inequality relationship is conditioned by the other two, cohort size seems to be the most important force at work. We resolve the apparent conflict between this macro finding on cohort size and the contrary implications of recent research based on micro data.

An Error-Components Three-Stage Least-Squares Model of Investment Allocation by Farm Households

This paper is an assessment of patterns of investment by farm households via an econometric model adapted from a land allocation approach of Holt (1999). This analysis will shed light on the importance of different classes of assets to farm household well-being, and show the reaction of farm households to a variety of market, international and government effects.Farm Management,

Well-Being, Inequality and Time: The Time-Slice Problem and its Policy Implications

Should equality be viewed from a lifetime or sublifetime perspective? In measuring the inequality of income, for example, should we measure the inequality of lifetime income or of annual income? In characterizing a tax as progressive or regressive, should we look to whether the annual tax burden increases with annual income, or instead to whether the lifetime tax burden increases with lifetime income? Should the overriding aim of anti-poverty programs be to reduce chronic poverty: being badly off for many years, because of low human capital or other long-run factors? Or is the moral claim of the impoverished person a function of her current state - meaning that someone who is badly nourished, badly housed, or in pain at present has a strong claim on our aid regardless of whether this is a chronic or transient state? Should we think of the aged as a suspect class, a low-well-being group? From the sublifetime perspective, the aged are indeed a kind of suspect class, because they tend to have low current incomes and health and to be socially isolated. But the aged have lived for many years and are therefore, as a matter of lifetime well-being, relatively rich compared to the rest of the population. This Article addresses the time-slice question. I use the framework of welfarism and the formal apparatus of social welfare functions to sharpen analysis. The first half of the Article argues for the lifetime perspective. The second half surveys the implications of that perspective for a host of legal and policy issues: the measurement of equality; the measurement of poverty; the design of redistributive taxes; the question whether non-tax instruments, such as environmental regulations or tort law, should also be used for redistribution; and how the suspect class framework and other distributively sensitive policy tools should be structured. Above all, the Article aims to raise the profile of a foundational question which has been insufficiently discussed - a question that anyone who cares about equality should grapple with

Well-Being, Inequality and Time: The Time-Slice Problem and its Policy Implications

Should equality be viewed from a lifetime or sublifetime perspective? In measuring the inequality of income, for example, should we measure the inequality of lifetime income or of annual income? In characterizing a tax as progressive or regressive, should we look to whether the annual tax burden increases with annual income, or instead to whether the lifetime tax burden increases with lifetime income? Should the overriding aim of anti-poverty programs be to reduce chronic poverty: being badly off for many years, because of low human capital or other long-run factors? Or is the moral claim of the impoverished person a function of her current state - meaning that someone who is badly nourished, badly housed, or in pain at present has a strong claim on our aid regardless of whether this is a chronic or transient state? Should we think of the aged as a suspect class, a low-well-being group? From the sublifetime perspective, the aged are indeed a kind of suspect class, because they tend to have low current incomes and health and to be socially isolated. But the aged have lived for many years and are therefore, as a matter of lifetime well-being, relatively rich compared to the rest of the population. This Article addresses the time-slice question. I use the framework of welfarism and the formal apparatus of social welfare functions to sharpen analysis. The first half of the Article argues for the lifetime perspective. The second half surveys the implications of that perspective for a host of legal and policy issues: the measurement of equality; the measurement of poverty; the design of redistributive taxes; the question whether non-tax instruments, such as environmental regulations or tort law, should also be used for redistribution; and how the suspect class framework and other distributively sensitive policy tools should be structured. Above all, the Article aims to raise the profile of a foundational question which has been insufficiently discussed - a question that anyone who cares about equality should grapple with

Risk Equity: A New Proposal

What does distributive justice require of risk regulators? Various executive orders enjoin health and safety regulators to take account of “distributive impacts,” “equity,” or “environmental justice,” and many scholars endorse these requirements. But concrete methodologies for evaluating the equity effects of risk regulation policies remain undeveloped. The contrast with cost-benefit analysis--now a very well developed set of techniques --is stark. Equity analysis by governmental agencies that regulate health and safety risks, at least in the United States, lacks rigor and structure. This Article proposes a rigorous framework for risk-equity analysis, which I term “probabilistic population profile analysis” (PPPA). PPPA is both novel, yet firmly grounded in the social-welfare-function tradition in welfare economics. The PPPA framework conceptualizes both the status quo, and possible policies, as probability distributions across population profiles -- where each population profile is, in turn, a concatenation of lifetime health-longevity-income histories, one for each member of the population. A utility function transforms each such profile into a utility vector. An equity-regarding social welfare function (SWF) is then specified. Policy analysts can employ the equity-regarding SWF both (1) to determine how policies compare purely as a matter of equality; and (2) to determine how they compare all-things-considered, considering both equality and overall welfare. The proposal may seem utopian, but is not. Scholars in the field of optimal tax policy already use SWFs to evaluate policies. Characterizing policies as distributions across population health-longevity-income profiles builds on existing risk assessment and general-equilibrium-modeling techniques. Utility functions can be specified through survey research and, in the interim, by building on standard functional forms. Plausible normative axioms considerably narrow the possible forms of the SWF, and survey research or thought experiments narrow the field further. Part I of the Article describes and criticizes existing approaches to risk equity that have been proposed in the scholarly literature: the environmental justice conception of risk equity; “individual risk” approaches; QALY-based equity analysis; incidence analysis; inclusive equality measurement; and cost-benefit analysis with distributive weights. Part II describes and defends PPPA. PPPA has many virtues. It recognizes that well-being is multidimensional, a function of both income and health/longevity; furnishes a metric for inequality; provides a framework for making tradeoffs between equality and overall well-being; and understands that distributive justice includes (but is not limited to) inequalities between high and low-status social groups

Stopping Start-Ups: How The Business Cycle Affects Entrepreneurship

This study analyzes whether economic conditions at the time of labor market entry affect entrepreneurship, using difference in business start-ups between cohorts of college students graduating in boom or bust economic conditions. Those graduating during an economic bust tend to delay their business start-ups relative to boom period graduates by about two years. Our results are consistent with additional findings that higher unemployment rates at time of graduation significantly delay the first business start-up across all college graduation cohorts over the 1982-2004 period. The adverse effect of a bust is temporary, delaying but not preventing self-employment over the life-cycle.Entrepreneurship; boom; bust; occupatiopnal choice; survivor analysis; business cycle; cohort

The Adequacy of Retirement Savings: Subjective Survey Reports by Retired Canadians

We examine retired Canadians’ subjective survey reports of satisfaction with finances,and with life, relative to the period before retirement.retirement, savings, subjective survey reports