Early childhood growth has many downstream effects on future health and reproduction and is an important measure of offspring quality. While a tradeoff between family size and child growth outcomes is theoretically predicted in high-fertility societies, empirical evidence is mixed. This is often attributed to phenotypic variation in parental condition. However, inconsistent study results may al...

Is It Money or Brains? The Determinants of Intra-Family Decision Power We empirically study the determinants of intra-household decision power with respect to economic and financial choices using a suitable direct measure provided in the 1989-2010 Bank of Italy Survey of Household Income and Wealth. Focusing on a sample of couples, we evaluate the effect of each spouse’s characteristics, househ...

A characteristic of African pre-transitional fertility regimes is large ideal family size. This has been used to support claims of cultural entrenchment of high fertility. Yet in Kenya fertility rates have fallen. In this paper this fall is explored in relation to trends in fertility norms and attitudes using four sequential cross-sectional surveys spanning the fertility transition in Kenya (19...

The rising incidence of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs), especially in young adults, presents great humanitarian and economic challenges to high-resource and, increasingly, to low-resource countries. No longer considered to be diseases of affluence, NCDs are exacerbated by urbanization and changes in social and lifestyle factors such as diet and family size. New research emphasizes the importan...

Siblings within the same family often differ dramatically in phenotype. Some differences are attributable to initial maternal handicaps (birth or hatching asynchrony, differences in egg or neonate size and hormonal or antioxidant titre); but differences among siblings may also arise from differences in the brood-rearing environment that offspring experience. Here, I use a model system--a long-t...

We investigate whether Egyptian mothers display son preference in their breastfeeding behaviour, given the trade off between the protective effects of breastfeeding and its contraceptive properties. We also examine how intensity of exposure to gender-biased parental investments before childbirth affects maternal nursing behaviour, exploiting exogenous variation in mothers’ age at premarital gen...

While recent studies confirm parental child sex preference in less developed countries, its pattern varies. Son preference is especially prevalent in Bangladesh, China, India, and Pakistan. Sex preference in sub-Saharan Africa is a neglected area of enquiry. Completed research focuses on women's views to the neglect of men, despite the latter's importance as primary decision-makers. This study ...

In contemporary wireless communication systems, complementary sequences play fairly important roles. Based on polyphase perfect sequences (PPSs), this paper presents a construction method, whose basic idea is to sample a given PPS with equal space, for yielding a family of periodic polyphase complementary sequence sets (PPCSSs). The advantages of this method include the family size of resultant...

This paper reports an eye-tracking experiment with 2500 polymorpemic Dutch compounds presented in isolation for visual lexical decision, while readers’ eye-movements were registered. We found evidence that both full-forms of compounds (dishwasher) and their constituent morphemes (e.g., dish, washer, er) and morphological families of constituents (sets of compounds with a shared constituent) pla...

We provide a new explanation for the narrowing and reversal of the gender education gap. We assume that parents maximize the full income of their children and that males have an additional income, independently of education. This additional income biases preferences towards sons and implies that females have relative advantage in producing income through education. When the returns to human cap...