世界経済・社会統計 = World development indicators

A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

A Treatise on the Family

absence of mandatory retirement, post-tenure review, and the new criticisms of tenure, which have tended to come from the right. The Casefor Tenure is a wonderful book and its publication comes at a very opportune time. While as an economist I naturally resonate with the economic arguments in support of a tenure system, its more basic goal of protecting academic freedom and allowing scholarship on controversial subjects of inquiry to flourish should not be minimized. This point was brought home to me personally during the late 1970s when three trustees at the institution I now help lead tried to block my promotion to full professor because they thought testimony I had given in a regulatory case attacked a segment of our society that they represented. The president of my great university ruled them out of order, but the event left me with a profound appreciation of the importance of tenure.' Finkin makes far too many insightful points to summarize, but two are worthy of mention here. First, tenure does not guarantee lifetime employment. It merely shifts the \"property right\" to a position from the academic institution to the tenured faculty member. The faculty member may be dismissed for 'just cause,\" but only after a process that assures that the faculty member received due process and that judgments about performance involve faculty participation. Properly designed systems of posttenure review are fully consistent with the tenure system. Similarly, tenured faculty members can be dismissed if economic conditions (\"financial exigency\") warrant the closure of their school, program, or department, but only as a last resort and after all other responsible means of dealing with the problem have been exhausted. Second, although academic institutions as we know them go back hundreds of years, tenure as we know it only became a widespread academic practice with thejoint adoption of the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure by the AAUP and the American Association of Colleges. One might wish to be able to turn to a long history to justify continuance of the tenure system; however, the argument must be based on a comparison of its

Succeeding generations: On the effects of investments in children.

/pdf/rose-mike-the-mind-at-work-valuing-the-intelligence-of-the-2u3kfnf20t.pdf

Rose, Mike. The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker.

In this paper, the authors model gender differences in cognitive ability in China using a new sample of middle-aged and older Chinese respondents. Modeled after the American Health and Retirement Survey (HRS), the CHARLS Pilot survey respondents are 45 years and older in two quite distinct provincesâ€”Zhejiang a high growth industrialized province on the East Coast, and Gansu, a largely agricultural and poor Province in the West. Their measures of cognition in CHARLS relies on two measures that proxy for different dimensions of adult cognitionâ€”episodic memory and intact mental status. They relate both these childhood health measures to adult health and SES outcomes during the adult years. They find large cognitive differences to the detriment of women that were mitigated by large gender differences in education among these generations of Chinese people. These gender differences in cognition are especially concentrated within poorer communities in China with gender difference being more sensitive to community level attributes than to family level attributes, with economic resources. In traditional poor Chinese communities, there are strong economic incentives to favor boys at the expense of girls not only in their education outcomes, but in their nutrition and eventually their adult height. These gender cognitive differences have been steadily decreasing across birth cohorts as the economy of China grew rapidly. Among younger cohorts of young adults in China, there is no longer any gender disparity in cognitive ability.

Gender Differences in Cognition among Older Adults in China

Recent empirical evidence has indicated that Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) do not have an aggregate effect on adult labour supply, however little attention has been paid to the role of other intrahousehold dynamics. This paper examines how the bargaining power structure of households affects the parental labour supply response to CCT programmes. We analyse randomized experimental designs from rural areas of Honduras (PRAF), Mexico (PROGRESA), and Nicaragua (RPS), and find that CCT programmes slightly change paternal and maternal labour supply and that this effect depends on the distribution of power in the household.

Conditional Cash Transfers, Female Bargaining Power and Parental Labour Supply

La juventud es una etapa critica en la vida de las personas: un periodo de transicion, en el que se han de tomar decisiones trascendentales en muchos ambitos, especialmente en la educacion y el trabajo. Conocer que hay detras de la eleccion entre estudiar y trabajar, o la combinacion de ambas, permite asistir, mediante la formulacion de politicas publicas, a quienes tratan de asegurar un futuro mejor para la proxima generacion de trabajadores en America Latina y el Caribe (ALC). Este objetivo es prioritario debido a los cambios en el mercado laboral, marcados por la irrupcion de nuevos adelantos tecnologicos que amenazan con automatizar tareas y ocupaciones. 

Millennials en America Latina y el Caribe: ?trabajar o estudiar? describe los principales resultados de un proyecto regional que conto con la participacion de mas de 15.000 jovenes de entre 15 y 24 anos en nueve paises (Brasil, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Haiti, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru y Uruguay). Dos levantamientos de datos (uno cuantitativo y otro cualitativo) permiten comprender mejor las habilidades, expectativas y aspiraciones de los jovenes, y el contexto en el que ellos se desarrollan . La novedad de este estudio es que va mas alla de las variables tradicionalmente levantadas en las encuestas de hogares, como ingresos o nivel de estudios, e incorpora otras menos convencionales: la informacion que los jovenes manejan acerca del funcionamiento del mercado laboral, y sus aspiraciones, expectativas y habilidades cognitivas y socioemocionales. Con ello, tratamos de entender mejor a los jovenes e impulsar medidas mas acordes a los desafios para desarrollar su potencial. Asi, sobre la base de estos hallazgos, esta publicacion sugiere que acciones de politica pueden ayudar a los jovenes a realizar una transicion exitosa desde sus estudios al mercado laboral.

Los resultados de esta investigacion, una radiografia detallada sobre los jovenes de America Latina y el Caribe, ofrecen un panorama alentador en la mayoria de los aspectos. En el no hay cabida para prejuicios y estereotipos, como los que pesan sobre los millennials o sobre los 20 millones de ninis (jovenes que ni estudian ni trabajan ni se capacitan) que hay en America Latina y el Caribe.

Millennials en América Latina y el Caribe: ¿trabajar o estudiar?

The high incidence of orphanhood among children makes Zimbabwe an interesting case to study the school/work decision for children able to attend lower secondary. After controlling for household wealth, covariates at the individual, and household levels, and community fixed effects, I find that orphans are less likely to attend school and more likely to work. While orphans and non‐orphans face the same marginal cost to go to school and work, living in blended households places orphans at a higher disadvantage. The main factor related to discrimination within households is living with household heads with whom children are not closely biologically related. Copyright © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Orphanhood, Household Relationships, School Attendance and Child Labor in Zimbabwe

This paper evaluates the impact of the Bono Trabajador Activo, a training voucher program in Chile, on workers' labor market outcomes. Using detailed administrative datasets of the National Employment Service and the Unemployment Insurance System, we apply difference-in-difference and IV estimators to measure these effects. Our main results indicate that the voucher program has an overall negative impact on employment and earnings, particularly among individuals who expect to change economic sector. In contrast, we find that the program improves labor outcomes for females, particularly for those with lower education. The voucher program also improves employment duration and mobility across economic sectors.

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/115524/1/IDB-WP-585.pdf

Training Vouchers and Labor Market Outcomes in Chile

Teenage pregnancy in the Dominican Republic represents a persistent development challenge. This paper uses data from a randomized impact evaluation of the youth training program Juventud y Empleo, which includes soft skills training, to examine its impact on teenage pregnancy. We find that the program reduces the probability of teenage pregnancy by 8 percentage points (about 20 %), particularly among teenagers who are not already mothers. The program seems to affect teenage pregnancy through improvements in soft skills and expectations, among other channels. In addition, we find that the program plays a protective role for teenagers from more deprived backgrounds.

http://www.iza.org/conference_files/riskonomics2015/novella_r6006.pdf

Rafael Novella

Papers

Conditional Cash Transfers, Female Bargaining Power and Parental Labour Supply

Millennials en América Latina y el Caribe: ¿trabajar o estudiar?

Orphanhood, Household Relationships, School Attendance and Child Labor in Zimbabwe

Training Vouchers and Labor Market Outcomes in Chile

Are you (not) expecting? The unforeseen benefits of job training on teenage pregnancy