I am in the midst of revising a paper that uses a very specific question from the Fragile Families Data set about reading to children. When I began writing the paper, I started looking for evidence with time-use surveys, such as the American Time Use Suvey (ATUS) which asks participants to record everything they do and for how many minutes on two given days (a weekday and a weekend, usually). I noticed, particularly at the PAA meetings this Spring, that there was a lot of controversy about these surveys. What, exactly, can they tell us about general effects, when we are looking at such a small sample of time for any given individual? More specifically, if we want to examine the effects of a particular policy, how does looking at one individual’s day give us a causal effect of a policy? Time use surveys are incredibly useful for seeing exactly how individual spends his time on any given day, and the possibilities for understanding the dynamics of child-rearing and marriage are far-reaching. The trade-off is that you have no way of knowing whether this is a typical day or not. On average, for the population, if we have a random sample of individuals and days are sufficiently randomly assigned, we should get an idea of what the population does, on average. But asking if a particular impetus leads to a specific behavioral change (for instance, does an increase in income mean you invest more in child’s education) is a little more problematic. The alternative is to ask questions in a survey setting about time-use behaviors without specifying the time. That’s what the Fragile Families does, and the question about how many days per week you read with your child has its own problems. I have long argued that when individuals answer the question, they must do some averaging over time. The question is not “how many days did you read with your child last week” as might be preferred or indicated by the literature on work (did you work last week?), but rather a sort of what do you usually do? I’ve been surprised at how much pushback I’ve received on this matter from discussants and reviewers. Most say the natural model to use is a count model, like negative binomial or Poisson, but I think it makes more sense to use an ordered probit, which allows for 4 to be more than 2, but not necessarily twice as much as 2. I don’t think the reading days answer is as firmly countable and identifiable as something like parking tickets, where a count model is the readily apparent model. I imagine the question is a lot like exercise. Over the weekend, I helped a friend with her match.com profile and one of the questions is how many days a week do you exercise? For some, the answer is absolutely 7, every single day. For others, zero, not lifting a finger. For most, though, I’d guess it varies from week to week. One week, you go every day, the next week is busy at work, so you go less often. Perhaps you go on a whole-day hike and tell me two days instead of one because you don’t want to seem lazy. Thus, when I ask you the question of how many days a week you exercise, you’re not really giving me a straight answer, through no fault of your own. You’re averaging over the last couple of weeks, you’re perhaps adjusting your answer to reflect what you think the surveyor is looking for, and you’re partially giving an impression of how much you value exercise. I’m having a hard time making this same argument regarding time spent with children to discussants and reviewers, and I’m not sure what I’m missing in my explanation to make it more convincing.
Category: Family
CESifo Conference on Children
I think this looks pretty cool. Call for papers comes due on July 15. And I’ve never been to Germany!
CESifo Economic Studies and UCLS Conference on Families, Children and Human Capital Formation
From 19/Oct/2012 to 20/Oct/2012
Among the issues to be covered include the causes and (short-and long-run) consquences of child health, early-life interventions and events, education and familiy poilicies and divorce (including the role of the family more generally). The keynote lectures will be delivered by Anna Aizer (Brown University) and Kevin Milligan.
Scientific organiser(s): 
Matz Dahlberg , Eva Maria Mörk and Anna Sjögren
See call for papers
Submit a paper
Contact for queries: office@cesifo.de
An education story, not an age story
Like much of changing and exciting news in demography, the New York Times’ story about births to women under 30 appears to be largely about education. Kathryn Edin, who wrote a book I’ve lauded several times in this space and use extensively in my own research, responds in an article Harvard Magazine.
“What the article essentially got wrong is that this is aneducation story, not an age story,” explains Edin, professor of public policy and management at Harvard Kennedy School and a prominent scholar of the American family. She points out that 94 percent of births to college-educated women today occur within marriage (a rate virtually unchanged from a generation ago), whereas the real change has taken place at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. In 1960 it didn’t matter whether you were rich or poor, college-educated or a high-school dropout—almost all American women waited until they were married to have kids. Now 57 percent of women with high-school degrees or less education are unmarried when they bear their first child.
The statistic put forth by the Times severely undercounts the issue when we don’t take into account education. College-educated women, it seems, are waiting for marriage to have kids, and non-college-educated women are having kids before they’re married. Importantly, it’s still a large group of women that are choosing to have kids without being married, and as I argue in my dissertation, it’s a group that merits more attention. We don’t know much about them.
Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers on why we study families
I’m often asked why my research is economics and not sociology. Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson give one answer as part of a longer Q&A on their research:
Your other areas of research focus include marriage, divorce, and family. Why would these areas interest economists? Or business leaders?
Dr. Stevenson: Economics is about how people make decisions optimally, given that they’re facing constraints. That framework can be applied anywhere, not just to things that are about dollars and cents and the economy. Families and labor markets are intimately connected, and to understand one, it’s helpful to understand the other. That’s because decisions about labor force participation and about what kinds of jobs to take and what kind of hours to keep are made within the context of family lives. What happens in families affects the way people make those kinds of decisions. And what happens in labor markets affects the decisions people make about families. Economists are also interested in families because we have come to realize that there are many parallels between family and labor markets.
Dr. Wolfers: The first place that people notice the similarities between family and economics is in what some have called the marriage market, which looks a whole lot like the labor market. People search for partners the same way they search for jobs. When you find a spouse or a job that looks like a good fit, you take it. And you must make a decision about how much time to spend searching for the perfect spouse or the perfect job before accepting a job or a spouse.
Related Content:
Welfare reform and desperation
This weekend’s NYT has a report on the status of welfare recipients in the recession. The consensus, it seems, is that things aren’t going so well.
The poor people who were dropped from cash assistance here, mostly single mothers, talk with surprising openness about the desperate, and sometimes illegal, ways they make ends meet. They have sold food stamps, sold blood, skipped meals, shoplifted, doubled up with friends, scavenged trash bins for bottles and cans and returned to relationships with violent partners — all with children in tow.
I thought that selling sex was a rather obvious omission from this list. Even without it, though, it’s a rather depressing read.
How to look rich by not breastfeeding
Almost every time that I’ve presented one of my dissertation papers, someone comes up to me to tell me about some experience they have had that is relevant to my paper. Often, they’re not happy. My paper on parental relationship quality and reading to children tends to really rile up single mothers, all of whom want to tell me how they managed to be good parents despite having unhappy marriages. Mostly, I reiterate how these are average and then just smile and thank them for their input.
Occasionally, though, someone tells me something inspiring, or sad, that really touches me. A student came to tell me about her own experiences with a violent relationship after I presented some of my research, and many others have told me stories about parenting.
Today, I presented the second chapter of my dissertation at the Central Pennsylvania Consortium’s annual Women, Gender, and Sexuality conference. That’s a mouthful, no? My second paper explores the extent to which promises of financial support given to single mothers by the fathers of their children have an influence on financially-constrained investments in children as the child gets older.
As we all finished, a woman who works at the College came up to tell me her story of growing up in Jamaica. She told me how formula was marketed to upper class mothers and so became a sign of wealth. And conversely, breastfeeding became a sign of poverty. Many mothers with few resources, she said, wanted to appear as though they were giving their children formula–the marketed as healthier option as well as the option that signaled ability to pay. Consequently, these mothers would use their limited resources to buy formula, but then would water it down in order to have more opportunities to show they were feeding their children with formula.
It broke my heart to hear it, but it also showcases a rather important problem that economists have. When we rely on survey data and on averages, all of these women would say that they used formula, but likely the nutritional outcomes for their children would be much different. So, not only is there a reporting problem whereby poor mothers might understate for how long and whether they breastfed, but the quality of the alternative has much more variability in nutritional value.
Outside of the measuring problem, I don’t think we’re all that good at identifying these types of what we would call irrational behavior. Without having interviewed women in depth or been there to witness this behavior, we likely would not include it in our analysis, leading to biased estimates.
Back to Becker
Two weeks ago, this blog got more hits in a day that it had during the entirety of its existence (~8 months). It wasn’t a big number relative to other blogs, for sure, but it was really exciting for me. Thanks for stopping by and reading and a particular thanks to Modeled Behavior and Brad DeLong and others for tweeting that post.
While it’s still hard to know exactly who is reading this (hi, Mom!), wordpress does give me an idea of where the clicks are coming from. One source that seemed to pop up a lot after the big day was the blog of a New Zealander who took issue with my characterization of Becker. He essentially argues that painting Becker’s ideas as antiquated can be quickly undone by releasing the gender constraints from the model. Let men do the laundry, essentially, and let women do waged work.
It’s a compelling proposition, but I believe the problems with applying Becker’s model go much deeper than the gender role issue. Changes in marriage and the resulting decrease in the usefulness of Becker’s models are a result of rather significant demographic and policy shifts. While there are certainly families who continue to operate under a strict separation of labor that leads to one partner earning wages and one staying at home, this is a rapidly diminishing proportion of American families, regardless of there is a male or female partner performing a particular gender role. Simply, fewer people are getting married, more and more women are having children out of wedlock, and divorce rates remain very high.
Specialization on the home/waged work divide is really only beneficial to both parties when the time horizon is unlimited, i.e., a marriage lasts a long time; or there’s so much inequality in the match that the low-earner has a high probability of being sufficiently taken care of if the match ends. It’s particularly damaging when partnerships end and the one who has foregone market labor is suddenly without compensation for household work in a world that (in almost all circumstances) demands at least some level of capital. Marriages, these days, don’t last that long, at least on average. This makes the risks of specialization much higher, particularly for one performing the unwaged work.
If you want to claim that “modern couples” specialize on a lesser level–say one does the laundry and one does the cooking–as a result of comparative advantage, you don’t reap the gains from complete specialization that are what make the Becker model tick. And, correct me if I’m wrong as I’m not a trade economist, but hasn’t the comparative advantage model pretty much been debunked?
Outsourcing is a solution, yes, when the two parties in a marriage have similar levels of human capital, similar desires to work, or face constraints such that raising a one-income family is impossible. But that doesn’t exist in Becker’s framework and I don’t think it jibes with the idea of domestic production. Once you add in a third person whose primary purpose is domestic production (child-rearing, cleaning, cooking, etc), the two-person model of production then becomes a model of consumption. The couple use their earnings to buy childcare, housecleaning, meals made, etc, in exchange for more leisure.
Interestingly, Justin Wolfers on Monday on twitter claimed himself as an exception to a recent paper claiming that male academics did less parenting than their female partners. While I applaud him for taking control of his parenting, he has a third person in the mix. He and his partner employ a nanny full-time to take care of their child. I don’t doubt that he’s presenting himself honestly, but I wonder how much of the equal parenting is a result of having a nanny, and how it might change if he didn’t. He says himself in the NYT profile that having the nanny allows him and his partner to do fun things with their daughter, like coloring, instead of fighting over getting dressed. Again, it comes down to shared consumption, rather than shared production.
So no, I don’t think you can generalize Becker, or bring him into the 21st century, by taking out the gender component. There’s just much more to it than that.
Wow, just wow
Another paper for my to-read list. From Christina Lindblad at Business Week:
The writers, Steven Rhoads of the University of Virginia and his son, Christopher Rhoads, of the University of Connecticut, studied a sample of 181 married, heterosexual, tenure-track professors all of whom had children under two and taught at schools with parental-leave policies. While 69 percent of the women in the sample took post-birth parental leave, only 12 percent of the men took advantage of the available leave—even though it was paid. They also learned that the male professors who did so performed significantly less child care relative to their spouses. Worse yet, they report that male tenure-track professors may be abusing paternity leave by using the time to complete research or publish papers, an activity that enhances their careers while putting their female colleagues at a disadvantage. One female participant quoted in the study put it this way: “If women and men are both granted parental leaves and women recover/nurse/do primary care and men do some care and finish articles, there’s a problem.”
Without reading, I’d really like to know how big this effect is. If so few men are taking paternity leave, how big is the problem (not that is lessens the problem for those affected, I’m just wondering if we can quantify it). In addition, is there a way to change the parenting men do without getting rid of paternity leave, i.e., can we shame men into doing it differently?
For Valentine’s Day, on love and marriage and economics
Perhaps I’m hyper aware of things going on in both media and social media these days, but it seems that UPenn economists Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson are everywhere these days. They’re all over my twitter feed for one. Then, today this came out in the Washington Post, and over the weekend, out came a profile in the NYT. The Times article describes them as a ‘power couple’ of economics. Which is pretty funny if you know any economist couples.
Though our research hasn’t come head to head yet, Justin and Betsey do a lot of work in family economics, much like I do. So, their meteoric rise to national prominence (at least among the WaPo-, NYT-reading set, is of interest to me. In particular, someone mentioned a quote from Betsey Stevenson saying that the household problem (as we so lovingly call it in economics) had turned from one of shared production to shared consumption.
Much of the dominant thinking in family and household economics has roots in Gary Becker’s A Treatise on the Family. It rests on ideas that can only politely be called antiquated. Women are in charge of domestic production (cleaning, child-rearing, cooking, laundry, etc) and men are in charge of bringing home the bacon. It’s specialization at the household level. Very economist-y. On some level, it probably made a lot of sense to think about marriage in this manner, particularly when women’s wages were much, much lower than men’s. In fact, it made so much sense that it partly earned Becker a Nobel Prize in Economics.
At some point during my fourth year of graduate school, I ordered my own copy. It was a simple (though really expensive!) purchase. A paperback, just a book, but a book that essentially formed much of the dominant thinking in my field. Even then, I knew its time in the spotlight was waning. I’ve still never read the whole thing. Despite knowing it was a classic, I can still only look up passages when I think they’re relevant. Reading more than a few pages makes the feminist in me absolutely boil.
But someone else recently said that, as economists, we should hope that our research becomes irrelevant, because that means that society has changed or that we’ve developed policy solutions for those questions and problems. And that’s probably what is happening here.
The world is changing; marriage is changing, love is changing. Household production is definitely changing. And perhaps all of this is about household consumption (enjoying kids and raising them together) rather than household production (raising kids, a public good). I’m unsure whether this is true at every socio-economic level, or whether it’s a privilege of high-earners, but it’s certainly an interesting way to frame and model marriage in economic terms.
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.
ERIN K. FLETCHER 
