This paper studies a version of the birth and immigration process in which families are followed in the order of their appearance. This age structure is related to a number of results from population genetics, in particular the genealogical structure of the infinitely-many neutral alleles model. The asymptotic behavior of this genealogy is an easy consequence of the structure of the age-ordered...

The influence that grandparents have on the life history traits of their descendants has been studied extensively. However, no attention has been paid to the potential influence a grandparent's own reproductive history has on the investment they make in their grandchildren. We use data from 658 Swiss grandchildren and 591 of their grandparents to investigate whether grandparents' reproductive s...

A persistent theme in much anthropological writing is the concept of the deliberate control of population numbers by hunter-gatherers as a means of achieving moderate family size, adequate nutrition, and constrained adult mortality. An analysis of the mix of theory and field evidence that led to this conclusion finds the case not proven. On the contrary, Malthusian constraints can operate, and ...

BACKGROUND Large family size may be a risk factor for childhood accidents. A possible association with quality of child supervision and rapidity of seeking medical care has not been fully evaluated. OBJECTIVES To determine whether children with multiple siblings are at increased risk for accidents, to assess whether quality of child supervision varies with family size, and to evaluate the rel...

Human reproductive behaviour is marked by exceptional variation at the population and individual level. Human behavioural ecologists propose adaptive hypotheses to explain this variation as shifting phenotypic optima in relation to local socioecological niches. Here we review evidence that variation in fertility (offspring number), in both traditional and modern industrialized populations, repr...

Employing data from the China rural-urban mobility survey conducted in 2010, this study investigates the influence of family demographic characteristics on the income, life satisfaction, and potential for rural-urban mobility at the rural household level of two provinces of China: Shaanxi and Henan. A larger labor force in a rural household was found to reduce a family's ability or inclination ...

Background: We tested the predictions of models of word reading development as to the effects of repeated exposure on reading of derived words. Aim: Our goal was to examine the impacts of variables that quantify different aspects of this exposure: base frequency, family frequency, and family size. Methods and Samples: In Experiment 1, we asked 75 children in Grades 3 and 5 to read derived words...

Relying on private tutoring expenditures in South Korea, this paper examines whether large family size has a strong negative impact on educational investments in children. In the face of difficulties in finding an exogenous IV for family size, the paper employs a nonparametric bounding method. Our primary finding is that quantity-quality trade-offs in educational investments function in a way t...

In this article, we analyze fertility control in a rural population characterized by natural fertility, using survival analysis on a longitudinal data set at the individual level combined with food prices. Landless and semilandless families responded strongly to short-term economic stress stemming from changes in prices. The fertility response, both to moderate and large changes in food prices,...