The Robert Graham Center, Policy Studies in Family Medicine and Primary Care, Washington, DC, USA. Larry A Green, MD, Director. Larry A Green lives and works in both Denver, Colorado, and Washington, DC. In Denver, he leads the national program office of Prescription for Health, a practice-based research initiative funded by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the US Agency for Healthcare Re...

We consider the infinite-horizon γ-discounted optimal control problem formalized by Markov Decision Processes. Running any instance of Modified Policy Iteration—a family of algorithms that can interpolate between Value and Policy Iteration—with an error at each iteration is known to lead to stationary policies that are at least 2γ (1−γ)2 -optimal. Variations of Value and Policy Iteration, that ...

The extent to which China’s family planning policy has driven its fertility transition over the past decades is debatable. The disagreement is partly sourced from the different ways of measuring the policy. Most existing measures, constructed on the policy history, generally, do not include complete secular and cross-sectional policy variations, fail to heterogeneously reflect people’s exposure...

Off-policy model-free deep reinforcement learning methods using previously collected data can improve sample efficiency over on-policy policy gradient techniques. On the other hand, on-policy algorithms are often more stable and easier to use. This paper examines, both theoretically and empirically, approaches to merging onand off-policy updates for deep reinforcement learning. Theoretical resu...

OBJECTIVES To study the influence of population policy and boy preference on the sibling structure, that is, in which order and combinations boys and girls are born into families. DESIGN A population-based survey with a representative sample of new mothers in 2008-2009 in rural China. SETTING Two provinces (Anhui and Shaanxi) where authorisation for a second child was usually given if the f...

The current total fertility rate in France is around 1.9 children per woman. This is a relatively high level by current European standards and makes France an outlier, despite the fact that its other demographic trends, especially conjugal behaviour, and social and economic trends are not very different from other Western European countries. France can serve as a counterfactual test case for so...

This article discusses the diversity of family policy models in 28 OECD countries in terms of the balance between their different objectives and the mix of instruments adopted to implement the policies. Cross-country policy differences are investigated by applying a principal component analysis to comprehensive country-level data from the OECD Family database covering variables such as parental...

Over the past decade, the linkages between marriage and child well-being have attracted the attention of researchers and policy makers alike. Children's living arrangements have become increasingly diverse and unstable, which raises important questions about how and why family structure and stability are related to child outcomes. This article reviews new research on this topic, emphasizing how...