Group-based lending programs for the poor have drawn much attention recently. As many of these programs target women, an important research question is whether program participation significantly changes reproductive behavior and whether the gender of the participant matters. Using survey data from 87 Bangladeshi villages, we estimate the impact of female and male participation in group-based c...

In the literature the recent upsurge in period birth rates is seen as evidence of a pronatalist effect of Sweden's extensive social insurance programs. Yet, these explanations cannot account for the downturn in birth rates in the 1970s, the delay in childbearing, and the constancy of cohort birth rates which characterize recent Swedish fertility behavior. To summarize the effect of Sweden's eco...

For the past decade or so, my colleagues and I at Indiana University have been conducting research on hearing-aid outcome measures in older adults. This seemed like a fertile area for further research when we embarked on this journey a decade ago. Several observations supported this supposition. First, it was known that about two-thirds of the hearing aids sold in the U.S. were purchased by ind...

This article draws out some implications of son targeting fertility behavior and studies its determinants. We demonstrate that such behavior has two notable implications at the aggregate level: (a) girls have a larger number of siblings (sibling effect), and (b) girls are born at relatively earlier parities within families (birth-order effect). Empirically testing for these effects, we find tha...

P to the historical fertility transition, which took place in most of Europe and North America between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, married women could expect eight or more births. Today many women do not have children at all. For centuries, the elasticity of fertility with respect to incomes was positive. Today it is zero or even negative. The fertility transition forms a...

Research on nonmarital fertility has focused almost exclusively on unmarried mothers, due in part to a lack of fertility information for men. Cycle 6 of the National Survey of Family Growth allows exploration of nonmarital fertility for both genders. We compare the characteristics of unmarried first-time mothers (n = 2,455) and fathers (n = 797), use event history techniques to model second bir...

Fertility rates vary across countries. Pooled data on more than 100 countries over the period 1955-85 are used to estimate a model of fertility behavior. The author found the impact of socioeconomic factors to differ across different age cohorts such that the negative impact of improvements in female status upon fertility rates is higher among the younger age cohorts. Cross-country differenc...

The end of the “one-child” policy in China has brought the discussion of how much birth control policies have actually affected women’s childbearing behavior back into the spotlight. Some people suggest that birth control policies explain most of the fertility decline in China, but others believe that socioeconomic development has also played a decisive role. To shed light on these questions, i...

Fertility is one of the responsible factors for the growth of human population. The demographers have given priority to understanding of the determinants of fertility through statistical techniques. Analytical models are suitable and appropriate tools and are widely used for better understanding of the phenomenon of the human fertility behavior. In other words, these models are useful in descri...

Females of most animal species are usually inseminated by more than one male, which allows sperm from different males to compete for fertilization. To prevent invasion of sperm from other males, Drosophila males elicit a rejection behavior in their mates after copulation. Using paired mutant males that, for the lack of accessory glands, are sterile, we show that this rejection behavior is induc...