Out-of-wedlock fertility, post-pregnancy choices and contraceptive usage

This paper examines the evolution of out-of-wedlock conceptions and births for cohorts born in the US from 1955 to 1982 and the role that modern contraception played in these trends. Substantial increases in conception outside of marriage only partially account for the upward trend in illegitimacy. Among those who conceived out-of-wedlock, the incidence of shotgun (post-conception) marriage decreased sharply, as did the incidence of abortion. Contraceptive use and pregnancy planning do not appear to shape the trend in out-of-wedlock conception, but post-conception choices evolved differently for unplanned pregnancies, with a negligible decrease in shotgun marriages. Furthermore, conditional on own use of contraception and planning of the pregnancy, women in "premarital sexual intercourse markets" with high contraceptive use are less likely to give birth out-of-wedlock. The trend in out-of-wedlock motherhood over time is significantly steeper when modern contraceptive use in the woman's premarital sexual intercourse market is accounted for, suggesting that its generalization contributed to moderate the increase in out-of-wedlock motherhood

Parental ethnic identity and child development

We examine the relationship between parental ethnic identity and cognitive development in ethnic minority children. This aspect of parental identity may shape children’s cognitive outcomes through a direct influence on parenting behaviour, or by mediating parental access to social resources. Drawing an ethnic minority sample from a detailed UK cohort study, we find a negative association between maternal majority identity and children’s cognitive test scores. This result is driven by poor households, by those who lack local family support networks, and by those who mostly speak a foreign language at home. We suggest that differential access to social resources is the most persuasive explanation of this result. Differences in parenting behaviour do not seem to play an important role

Do personality traits affect productivity? Evidence from the lab

While survey data supports a strong relationship between personality and labor market outcomes, the exact mechanisms behind this association remain unexplored. In this paper, we take advantage of a controlled laboratory set-up to test whether this relationship operates through productivity, and isolate this mechanism from other channels such as bargaining ability or self-selection into jobs. Using a gender neutral real-effort task, we analyse the impact of the Big Five personality traits on performance. We find that more neurotic subjects perform worse, and that more conscientious individuals perform better. These findings are in line with previous survey studies and suggest that at least part of the effect of personality on labor market outcomes operates through productivity. In addition, we find evidence that gender and university major affect the impact of the Big Five personality traits on performance

Parental ethnic identity and child test scores

We examine the relationship between parental ethnic identity and the test scores of ethnic minority children. We use standard survey measures of the strength of parental identity alongside validated cognitive test scores in a rich British cohort study. We show that children whose mothers report either an adoption or an active rejection of the majority identity tend to score lower in cognitive tests at age 7, compared to those children whose mothers report neutral feelings about the majority identity. We find no consistent differences in test scores according to mothers’ minority identity. Our findings provide no support for education or citizenship policies which promote the adoption of the majority identity or discourage the maintenance of separate identities in ethnic minority communities

Centralization and Accountability: Theory and Evidence from the Clean Air Act ∗

This paper studies fiscal federalism when regions differ in voters’ability to monitor public offi cials. We develop a model of political agency in which rent-seeking politicians provide public goods to win support from heterogeneously informed voters. In equilibrium, we find that voter information increases government accountability but displays decreasing returns. Therefore, political centralization reduces aggregate rent extraction when voter information varies across regions. When the central government sets a uniform national policy, each region benefits in inverse proportion to its residents’information. We test this prediction using panel data on pollution and newspaper circulation across the United States. The 1970 Clean Air Act centralized environmental policy at the federal level. Consistent with our theory, we find that less informed states benefited from a faster decrease in pollution afte