Population policies are defined here as voluntary programs which help people control their fertility and expect to improve their lives. There are few studies of the long-run effects of policyinduced changes in fertility on the welfare of women, such as policies that subsidize the diffusion and use of best practice birth control technologies. Evaluation of the consequences of such family plannin...

Informed by the research on adaptive decision making in other animal species, this study investigated human females' intertemporal and risky choices across the ovulatory cycle. We tested the hypothesis that at peak fertility, women who are exposed to environments that signal availability of higher quality mates (by viewing images of attractive males), become more impulsive and risk-seeking in e...

Theories based on partial equilibrium reasoning alone cannot explain the widespread negative cross-sectional correlation between parental wages and fertility, without restrictive assumptions on preferences and childcare costs. We argue that incorporating a dynamic general equilibrium analysis of returns to human capital can help explain observed empirical patterns. Other by-products of this the...

Are U.S. immigrants' English proficiency and social outcomes the result of their cultural preferences, or of more fundamental constraints? Using 2000 Census microdata, we relate immigrants' English proficiency, marriage, fertility and residential location variables to their age at arrival in the U.S., and in particular whether that age fell within the "critical period" of language acquisition. ...

Born under the one-child policy and growing up in an environment of tremendous socioeconomic change, the post-1980s generation of China tends to have interesting fertility preferences. This study explores the fertility desire, gender preference, and potential utilization of fetal ultrasound among the post-1980s individuals in urban China, based on a survey conducted in Beijing and Puyang, China...

Ever since attempts were made to construct quantitative measures of individual fertility preferences and intentions, the interpretation of these measures has been controversial. Women in developing countries often have more children than they desire. This is particularly the case in Latin America, where the relative gap between actual and desired fertility levels is larger than in any other maj...

This study summarizes patterns of educational differentials in wanted and unwanted fertility at different stages of the fertility transition. The data are from Demographic and Health Surveys in 57 less developed countries. As the transition proceeds, educational differentials in wanted fertility tend to decline and differentials in unwanted fertility tend to rise. An assessment of fertility pat...

OBJECTIVES To determine the effects of child mortality and fertility preference on fertility status in rural Ethiopia. DESIGN Case-referent where the cases were women with number of children ever born alive was less than five and controls were women with number of children ever born alive greater or equal to five. SETTING Butajira rural health project study base which is a field epidemiolog...