Iran's significant success in implementing Family Planning (FP) during the past 25 years, has made it a role model in the world. The Total Fertility Rate (TFR) in Iran has dropped from 6.5 in 1960 to 1.6 in 2012, which is well below the targeted value of 2.2 for the country. Iran's success story, however, did not merely root in the implementation of FP programs. In other words, families' strong...

Larger units, vertical integration, and other structural changes to the swine industry are controversial in Minnesota as elsewhere. I'm frequently asked how public policies might be modified in order to influence these changes. My response is that we need to understand how government policies may have played a role in triggering past changes in the livestock industry so that we are in a better ...

With the support of the international women's movement, the ideology and methods of traditional population policy were effectively attacked at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD). The author discusses some of the complaints about population policy and family planning programs, then considers the substantive, ethical, and feasibility issues of population and r...

This paper investigates the effect of the reduction in the young cohort size caused by Chinese family planning policies on the educational upgrading among older cohorts born before the policies. I suggest that family planning polices reduce the size of the young cohorts and increase their educational levels. Through imperfect substitutability of workers with same education but different ages, t...

Why is it that couples who have a son or whose last child is a son earn higher conditional income? To solve this curious case we tell a detective story: evidence of a phenomenon to be explained, a parade of suspects, a process of elimination from the enquiry, and then the denouement. Given the draconian family planning policy and a common perception that there is strong son preference in rural ...