Children by the Numbers
The US COVID-19 baby bust and rebound
Melissa Kearney & Phillip Levine
Journal of Population Economics, October 2023, Pages 2145–2168
Abstract:
We document the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on births in the USA. First, using Vital Statistics birth data on the universe of US births, we show that the US pandemic initially was associated with a “baby bust” period, from August 2020 through February 2021. During these 7 months, there were nearly 100,000 fewer births than predicted based on pre-existing birth trends and seasonality. Many of these missing births would have been conceived after the pandemic began in March of 2020, consistent with a behavioral fertility response to pandemic conditions. Other missing births would have been conceived before the onset of the pandemic. Some of these are attributable to reduced immigration of pregnant women and some to altered pregnancy outcomes for women who were pregnant during the early months of the pandemic. We further document a COVID birth rebound between March and September 2021, amounting to about 30,000 more births than predicted. Second, we document variation across US states in the size of the baby bust and rebound and investigate how that variation statistically relates to contextual factors. The bust was larger in states with larger increases in the unemployment rate, a larger reduction in household spending, and more COVID cases. The rebound was larger in states that experienced larger improvements in the labor market and household spending, consistent with a positive effect of economic conditions on birth rates, and smaller in places that had mask mandates, consistent with a dampening role of social anxiety about the ongoing pandemic.
Effects of Siblings on Cognitive and Sociobehavioral Development: Ongoing Debates and New Theoretical Insights
Wei-hsin Yu & Hope Xu Yan
American Sociological Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Despite social scientists’ long-standing interest in the influences of siblings, previous research has not settled the debates on how relevant sibship size is to child development and whether growing up with more siblings could be beneficial. Using 30 years of longitudinal data and fixed-effects models, this study offers the most comprehensive evidence on how sibship size is tied to cognitive and sociobehavioral development. We also advance the literature by systematically comparing the consequences of gaining a sibling for children with varying ordinal positions. Contrary to prior studies using selective data from limited observation spans, we find that children experience net decreases in cognitive test scores as their family size grows. At the same time, our analysis shows that sibling additions are only important to first- and second-born children’s -- not later-born children’s -- cognitive development. Even for the first- and second-born, the marginal effect of adding a sibling lessens with each addition. Our results thus demonstrate the time-dependent nature of family resource-dilution processes. For sociobehavioral development, the evidence indicates that having an older sibling is beneficial, but gaining a younger sibling increases behavioral problems for some (e.g., first-born children). Because more children from large families have older siblings, children from larger families exhibit less problematic behavior, on average. By uncovering the complex relationship between siblings and noncognitive development, this study also generally contributes to the sociology of family and inequality.
The Intergenerational Effects of Parental Leave: Exploiting Forty Years of U.S. Policy Variation
Andrea Flores, George-Levi Gayle & Andrés Hincapié
NBER Working Paper, November 2023
Abstract:
We study the effects of job-protected leave policies on intergenerational mobility, long-run child outcomes, and parental decisions (labor market, investments in children, and fertility). We merge rich sources of historical information on family leave policies across the United States since 1973 with over 40 years of survey data covering two generations of individuals. Exploiting variation in the timing of job-protected leave policies introduced in a large set of 18 states and the District of Columbia before the enactment of the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) in 1993, we find that the pre-FMLA protected leave policies had a level effect and a mobility effect. The level effect yields from overall improvements in education and wages for the children born under these policies. The mobility effect, chiefly an increase in intergenerational mobility in education, stems from heterogeneity in the effects of the policies: children of mothers with fewer years of education benefit more. As a potential mechanism, we find that the policies increased mothers’ time investments in children and the likelihood of the households having childcare expenses. Finally, consistent with the tradeoffs of policy design, we find that the policies exacerbated the motherhood penalty in labor market outcomes and that they affected fertility choices, increasing the likelihood of having a first child and decreasing the likelihood of having subsequent children.
The Effects of the Dobbs Decision on Fertility
Daniel Dench, Mayra Pineda-Torres & Caitlin Knowles Myers
Middlebury College Working Paper, November 2023
Abstract:
The U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization sparked the most profound transformation of the landscape of abortion access in 50 years. We provide the first estimates of the effects of this decision on fertility using a pre-registered synthetic difference-in-differences design applied to newly released provisional natality data for the first half of 2023. The results indicate that states with abortion bans experienced an average increase in births of 2.3 percent relative to states where abortion was not restricted.
Changes in parental gender preference in the USA: Evidence from 1850 to 2019
Todd Jones, Matthew Millington & Joseph Price Journal of
Population Economics, October 2023, Pages 3057–3070
Abstract:
We examine the degree to which parental gender preferences in the USA have changed over time. To quantify levels of parental sex preference, we compare the likelihood that mothers have a third child given the gender makeup of their first two children. We construct a novel dataset of women’s fertility histories using full-count censuses from 1850–1880 and 1900–1940 and extend the sample to 2019 using more recent datasets. We find a preference for having a mix of genders with only a small preference for sons. We find that a woman is about 2 percentage points more likely to have a third child if the sex of her first two children is the same, and this effect was very stable from 1850 to 1940. In contrast, we find that this effect gets much larger after 1940, reaching a high point in 1990–2000 of about 6–7 percentage points.
Disentangling genetic and environmental influences on early language development: The interplay of genetic propensity for negative emotionality and surgency, and parenting behavior effects on early language skills in an adoption study
Rachael Cheung et al.
Child Development, forthcoming
Abstract:
Parenting and children's temperament are important influences on language development. However, temperament may reflect prior parenting, and parenting effects may reflect genes common to parents and children. In 561 U.S. adoptees (57% male) and their birth and rearing parents (70% and 92% White, 13% and 4% African American, and 7% and 2% Latinx, respectively), this study demonstrated how genetic propensity for temperament affects language development, and how this relates to parenting. Genetic propensity for negative emotionality inversely predicted language at 27 months (β = −.15) and evoked greater maternal warmth (β = .12), whereas propensity for surgency positively predicted language at 4.5 years (β = .20), especially when warmth was low. Parental warmth (β = .15) and sensitivity (β = .19) further contributed to language development, controlling for common gene effects.