Category: Children

On Shared Consumption

Last week, I wrote about the economics profession’s new “power couple”, Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson, and mentioned the idea of shared consumption driving marriage rather than shared production. In the comments, Katina asked me to explain shared consumption a bit more in depth and I promised her a longer post on the matter. I’m a little late, but here it is. I haven’t formally modeled any of this, and so I’ll say it’s not very clearly thought out, but in the name of elucidating the inner workings of this economist’s mind, I figured I’d at least outline my thoughts here.

One of the perhaps more complicated ways to define shared consumption comes from the study of public goods. Public goods are things like national defense or clean air. They constitute things that are non-excludable and non-rivalrous in consumption. There’s a lot of buzz words in that sentence, but just think about things that you can enjoy (or gain utility from) without diminishing someone else’ enjoyment (this is the non-rivalrous part) and things that, once they are in existence, no one can easily prevent someone else from enjoying it, say through an entrance fee (this is the non-excludable part).

Shared consumption goods are a little less strict than this, however. The idea of shared consumption lets us take what we would normally call “private” goods (non-public, like shoes–we both can’t wear the same pair of shoes) and give them some public (or sharing) aspects within a marriage or partnership.

A big shift in family economics has been to examine children as a public good. See, for instance, Chiappori, Iyigun and Weiss. The idea is that two people investing in a child reap benefits from both their own investment and the other’s investment. But this is a little convoluted for a non-economist, maybe.

Perhaps even simpler is when we take children out of the equation. Many couples these days marry without any intention of having children, even if though it might mean paying more in taxes. Two-earner households aren’t specializing in household production by one staying at home to cook and clean while the other works, but rather enter into a marriage for the purpose of keeping each other company.

To back me up, the New York Times published a piece outlining a significant demographic shift in parenthood over the past few years. Namely, more than half of children born to mothers under 30 are born to single mothers. If that’s not a refutation of shared production, I don’t know what is. This is a theme that is also prominent in my new favorite ethnography (not so new, really, but if you ever want to see me get really excited, ask me about Promises I Can Keep).

In addition, I’m currently reading Is Marriage for White People? by Ralph Richard Banks of Stanford Law. Early on, he cites a Pew study that says shared religious beliefs, shared interests, a healthy, happy sexual relationship and even sharing household chores were more important for a happy marriage than children. We’re not getting married to have children, necessarily, anymore, and when we are, we’re not convinced that specializing in raising the child is the best thing for one parent to do.

As pertaining to children, there’s a fine line between what constitutes consumption and production, but I think it’s safe to say that most matches aren’t happening with the primary purpose of building a home with a white picket fence in the suburbs and raising a couple of kids who go on to do the same. Americans are marrying to make themselves better off still, just not in the way that our parents and grandparents did.

Additional Motivation or Why Academic Work NEVER ends

Additional motivation for a paper, that is. A new study shows that children whose mothers are “nurturing” have higher hippocampal volumes–or higher capacity for memory, learning and stress-management (I’m told). While much of the motivation in my paper comes from development of cognitive skills, reading to children might also fall under the definition of nurturing. And since it’s particularly attributed to mothers, I’m going to go with it. Cite it, add it to the motivation section.

The study was funded by the National Institute of Health; the full text is available here.

As a side note, I think it’s fascinating to examine the controls that other fields include as superimportant. For instance, right- or left-handedness is controlled for in this population. We can only say this about right-handed children!

As another side note, I can’t believe that so many preschoolers are depressed.

h/t @AnnieFeighery

Joan L. Luby, Deanna M. Barch, Andy Belden, Michael S. Gaffrey, Rebecca Tillman, Casey Babb, Tomoyuki Nishino, Hideo Suzuki, and Kelly N. Botteron. 2012. “Maternal support in early childhood predicts larger hippocampal volumes at school age” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2012 ; published ahead of print January 30, 2012, doi:10.1073/pnas.1118003109.

 

Environmental stress and obesity

I haven’t had the chance to read this paper yet, though I surely hope to get to it in the next week or so, but I think it’s rather fascinating. Gary Evans, a scholar at Cornell, shows that stressful home environments lead to obesity later in life. There is a rather large set of literature in fields such as medicine that link stressful home environments–embodied in poverty, unhappy parents, and more–to children’s outcomes–smaller incomes, less educational attainment, depression, and more. This work is of particular importance to some of my own work, where I show that a poor relationship between parents is correlated with a mother’s reading days with a child, which, in turn, is a good predictor of success later in life.

Treating students differently

Education research seems to be teeming lately with the idea of the “threat of stereotype”, whereby women in particular don’t do as well on tests not because they are incapable but because they are faced with prejudice. If people think I’m going to do poorly, why work hard, or so goes the logic.

This article from the Daily Beast, which outlines much of the research on such ideas of late, struck me for its mention of how students are treated differently by their teachers.

In a study published last year, psychologist Howard Glasser at Bryn Mawr College examined teacher-student interaction in sex-segregated science classes. As it turned out, teachers behaved differently toward boys and girls in a way that gave boys an advantage in scientific thinking. While boys were encouraged to engage in back-and-forth questioning with the teacher and fellow students, girls had many fewer such experiences. They didn’t learn to argue in the same way as boys, and argument is key to scientific thinking. Glasser suggests that sex-segregated classrooms can construct differences between the sexes by giving them unequal experiences. Ominously, such differences can impact kids’ choices about future courses and careers.

I don’t teach single-sex classes, but in my principles classes, I’ve noticed that the men seem to ask questions–and answer questions–in a way that encourages debate. While women are perfectly willing to raise their hands when they have the right answer, they’re less likely to disagree with me or ask a question that seems to critically engage the subject matter.

Thankfully, this seems to diminish a little in upper division classes, where I see both men and women engaging the ideas and critiquing what is set before them. So at least anecdotally, I’d argue that all is not lost by middle school. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work harder to get women to engage critically at every level.

Chapter 2

I’m going a little out of order here because I’m trying to deal with something random on my first chapter that arose this week.

The second chapter of my dissertation has to do with expectations, incidentally the unifying theme of this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics.

Believe me, I’m not there.

In this chapter, (chapter2_health) I show that a mother’s expectations of financial support from her child’s father influence how she invests in her child’s health. In the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing survey, women are asked a the birth of their child whether the father promised financial support. Around the child’s first birthday, they are asked when the child last went to the doctor and for long they breastfed. Interestingly, the promise of financial support is a significant predictor of whether the last doctor’s visit was in the last three months, but the effect is much more pronounced for black women. For white women, the promise of financial support is a significant predictor of how long a woman breastfed.

When I started this paper, I imagined I would be addressing a simple problem of financial (doctor’s visits) versus non-financial (breastfeeding) investments. The promise of support would make you feel richer and thus more likely to invest where you might feel constrained financially.

It turns out, however, that the effect is much more complicated that. The differences by race, which are largely differences of SES and class given the sampling strategy, indicate that a promise of support likely means very different things to people in different circumstances. The lack of distinction in terms of affecting financial versus non-financial investments also indicates that the question likely has a psychological or cultural angle that is not captured by the question itself.

In short, be careful with questions about expectations.

Dissertation

There is a large debate in the economics community about the value of putting out working papers. When a working paper creates significant buzz, whether in the media, on twitter, or even just among economists, the conclusions in the paper take hold. That first impression is shown to be very persistent, even when a later version of the paper comes up with opposite results.

At least as long as I’ve had this blog, I’ve had a note on my research page saying that links to working papers are forthcoming. I’ve completed my dissertation and am working on revising the chapters to submit to journals. I’m fairly certain that the big picture of these papers isn’t going to change and my advisors were insistent that each of my chapters was very close to that point. Consequently, revisions are small at this point, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t benefit from a little help from the internets.

Over the next few weeks, I will post each of the chapters of my dissertation here. Comments, suggestions, typos, criticism, etc. are welcome.

What’s the matter with Kansas?, redux

I saw mutterings that a repeal of domestic violence laws might actually take place in Kansas a few weeks ago, but I had a hard time believing that it might actually come to pass. It did, and now the mainstream news is covering it. I’m not a lawyer, but I have to believe this violates equal protection clause of the Constitution. It’s unbelievable to me that anyone would use the economy to justify picking and choosing which crimes to prosecute. Beyond that, though, I’m astounded that even if you are able to justify your actions so callously–as those in charge in Topeka are doing–you cannot see that it’s incredibly short-sighted to repeal domestic violence laws. You create such perverse incentives–increase in battering, reduction in reporting, decrease in intervention by police, family members, neighbors. Haven’t we established that domestic violence is extremely costly? To individuals, to society, to workplaces, to the insurance system, to children. Endangering women and children is not the way to make a point.

Vaccines–or the lack thereof

A recently released study in Pediatrics shows that more than 1 in 10 children don’t receive their vaccinations as scheduled by their doctor, and likely as scheduled by the American Academy of Pediatrics. There are indicators that race and class have some bearing on whether parents follow the recommended schedule, but also a strong sense that the decision not to follow a schedule is often made before birth of the child. This may seem unsurprising to some, as often parents discuss and establish how they are going to raise a child before it’s brought into the world, but from an economic standpoint, kind of flies in the face of treating a vaccination as an investment. I am careful, in my research, to include controls for things like current medical insurance or medicaid assistance when it comes to measuring a similar outcome. As economists, it makes sense to assume that the marginal decision of taking the child to the doctor at any given scheduled checkup is subject to financial constraints. But if those decisions are made before the child is even born, then perhaps marginal analysis isn’t the correct way of approaching the problem.

Good for mothers or for others?

The NYTimes Economix blog published a post today on how measures of well-being for women throughout the world fail to take into account mothers. Ability to access higher education, higher echelons of management, salary parity, etc, are all measures of how well women are doing in relation to men, but doesn’t say much about how able women are to care for their children. We know that women who have children take more time off of work, are more vulnerable to poverty and unemployment and likely suffer decreased salaries over time as a result of their decisions to raise children. A ever more limited focus on social safety nets like Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) makes them even more vulnerable.

Less than a week ago, the Times also published a piece lamenting the status of single people in the US. In particular, single people are not entitled to things like family leave and pay higher rates of insuranc.

So, who should we actually be worried about? Most likely the answer is that who worries us changes depending on what outcome we want to achieve. Both groups, mothers and single people, have a lot to contribute to society. Single people are more likely to be engaged in their communities, to volunteer and maintain social connections, contributing to a sense of community, perhaps, and mothers, well, they contribute their children. From an equity standpoint, it doesn’t make much sense to deny single people the benefits afforded to married people. And if we’re interested in overall climate for women, ignoring singleness in an analysis of economic well-being is (perhaps not quite) as deleterious as ignoring the plight of mothers. But perhaps that’s impetus for more clarity in our work and precision in our assessments. Measures of subjective analysis should identify the population that benefits, and if we’re going to include things like maternity leave, we should shoot for gender and marital status equality in those measures. Can father’s take time off after the addition of a child to the family (by birth or by adoption); can single people take time off to care for ailing siblings? I’m not necessarily advocating for equality within these sorts of things, just that if we’re going to ask the question of one group, we should ask it for all groups.

Sperm donation and millions of kids

An article in the NYT yesterday about sperm donors fathering hundreds of children left me with a lot of questions. The first of course being where’s Jack Shafer when you need him? The article is, unsurprisingly, bereft of information. Despite its length, it fails to report average numbers of children fathered or any indication of how widespread the phenomenon is or even what a sperm donor earns for his ‘donation.’

Regardless, I think it brings up some really fun questions about demand for children and demand for certain traits in our children as well as throwing the marriage market for a little loop (Clearly, I’m teaching demand this week in principles). In general, literature about the marriage market indicates that humans engage in both positive assortative mating and negative assortative mating, depending on which traits we examine. For instance, we positively assortatively mate (or choose partners that are similar to us) when we look at traits like education, intelligence, attractiveness, income and wealth. It seems that we have the best chance attracting and keeping a mate who is similar to us, at least when it comes to those qualities. This wasn’t always true, at least on factors like education, and things like in-home and out-of-home work skills. In fact, there is an entire book written about negative assortative matching on certain qualities and how that contributes to our understanding of marriage and gains from specialization. Even where we do see negative assortative matching (where people choose dissimilar mates), there is often an underlying similarity that is driving the match. For instance, a debate into which I unwillingly stumbled the other night revealed that marriages between people raised in Jewish and Catholic traditions were more successful than marriages between those raised in Catholic and Protestant traditions. The argument is that the group rituals associated with Jewish and Catholic faiths are more similar in terms of fostering interdependence than rituals among different sects of Christianity, imbuing people with differing levels of individualism and thus compatibility.

But I digress. When parents, for whatever reason, choose to have a child with the help of a donor, either egg or sperm, that process of pairing biological parents through matching on similar qualities no longer occurs. Instead, we have a situation where we commodify those traits we were formerly matching on. Without the matching mechanism (regardless of how strongly you think it predicts mating patterns), the best prediction of who gets the most attractive, educated, intelligent person to provide the other half of a child’s genes is now not the most attractive, educated or intelligent person, but rather just the one willing to pay the most money.

And so, even if the proliferation of kids from a single donor is rare, it really should come as no surprise. There are likely premiums paid to sperm donors for such traits, if not, those guys really need to get their act together. If I were going to pick someone to biologically father my children, irrespective of and also ignorant of his character, attitude and ability to provide for those children, I’m sure that I’d choose the 6’2″, athletic, handsome, 150 IQ physicist over the 5’6″, dumpy, overweight, tv watching, 90IQ burger flipper. It could be that the latter would be a much better father and provider, but merely as a gene donor, I’ll take the former. And probably so would most women, and probably they would also be willing to pay more for it. I have no idea whether physicist with 150 IQs donate sperm, but even so, it’s likely that there are donors that are more in demand than others.

I realize that all of this may seem very obvious, but I’m not sure that anyone has actually looked closely at it. Of course, it may be that no one has looked at it because it’s a pretty small issue (hence my wish for Jack Shafer to call it out), or because it’s rather difficult to measure. The article itself mentions that even many sperm banks do not know how many children are actually born as a result of their work, so accurate, aggregate numbers might be hard to come by.

In college, a friend who was struggling financially looked into selling her eggs. She decided not to do it–having one’s eggs harvested is extremely hard on the body–but not before finding out that her potential offspring were quite valuable. Young, athletic, blond and wicked smart, the agency was sure they could all do quite well with her eggs. I think the only thing she could have done to increase the price of her eggs was be Jewish (apparently there are relatively very few Jewish egg donors, thus driving up their value).

Ultimately, the high demand for sperm from certain types of people is likely more easily met than demand for eggs from certain types of people; that’s why we’re talking about men fathering hundreds of children, not women. And we don’t exactly know what the consequences are of having so many children from one parent are, but this brings up a collective action problem as well. Likely, it would be better for everyone–the child himself, society as a whole, the potential half-siblings, etc–if you didn’t choose that best-qualified sperm donor. Variation in the gene pool is important for evolution, not to mention the risks (as mentioned in the article, though they are likely small) for unintentional mating between half-siblings. But it’s really best for you individually to choose that best sperm donor, especially if you don’t know that his sperm is also going to spawn 200 other children, in which case, this is really a problem of imperfect information.

I think I did too much economics this week.