Macro Models of Household Formation and Fertility

该项目包括生育率和家庭形成的宏观模型的研究。第一部分是关于家庭形成的研究。其次，分析了生育率作为家庭规模的一个具体维度。最后，制定了审查生育决定的规范性框架。拟议研究的目标是进一步将家庭经济学与传统宏观经济学结合起来。特别是，这项研究试图更好地理解以下问题：1.为什么今天的人们生活在比150年前更小的家庭中？这是一个令人担忧的原因，还是对不断增长的收入的有效反应？2.文献中的结果认为，家庭规模可以解释数据中的几种模式(例如，消费的生命周期峰值)，是否与将家庭规模视为内生变量的观点一致？3.婚姻制度(例如，一夫多妻制)是否具有聚合效应？4.收入和生育率之间的关系是什么？随着时间的推移，这种关系是否稳定？5.非洲的生育率是否太高，而德国的生育率是否太低？为了回答上述问题，研究人员将依靠现代宏观经济学的工具，建立生育率和家庭规模选择的量化模型。家庭的形成，特别是生育率，是一个跨期的决定，因此，现代动态一般均衡理论的方法论是研究这些主题的自然工具。使用一般均衡模型来研究传统上由劳动经济学家解决的问题，可以调查反馈效应。例如，生育决定影响未来的总劳动力供应，因此影响资本劳动比率和工资。未来的工资--一个衡量孩子预期幸福程度的指标--可能会反过来影响生孩子的动机。为了定量研究这些模型，拟议的研究使用了来自各种来源的数据。主要使用的两个微观数据集是消费者支出调查(CEX)和美国人口普查数据。CEX是美国详细消费者支出数据的极好来源。这些数据将被用来校准内生家庭规模的量化模型，在该模型中，共同生活的一个关键好处是家庭特有的公共产品(例如住房)。CEX通过斯坦福大学图书馆免费提供。使用的人口普查数据将是明尼苏达州人口中心免费提供的1850-2000年综合公共用途微数据系列(IPUMS)。通过IPUMS提供的整合使数据可以跨年份进行比较，这在研究几个世纪以来的家庭变化时是可取的。此外，这位研究人员对这个数据集有着丰富的经验，因为她从2001年6月到2002年9月一直在明尼苏达州人口中心担任研究助理。人口普查数据将用于研究过去150年来生育率、家庭规模和构成的变化。该项目特别感兴趣的是生育率与各种收入衡量标准之间的关系，以及这种关系是否发生了变化。更广泛的影响：为了促进关于最佳人口的辩论，开发了一个理论“工具箱”来分析规范性生育问题。对帕累托效率概念提出了两种可供选择的概括，适用于生育率是内生的情况。研究人员探索了这些概念的理论属性，并利用它们来阐明人口辩论。这项关于有效人口增长的工作为关于生育率和最佳人口增长率的政策辩论提供了一个重要工具。

This project consists of research on macro models of fertility and household formation. The first part involves research on household formation. Secondly, fertility as a specific dimension of household size is analyzed. Finally, a normative framework for examining fertility decisions is developed. The objective of the proposed research is to take a further step at combining family economics with traditional macroeconomics. In particular, the research seeks a better understanding of the following issues: 1. Why are people today living in smaller households than they did 150 years ago? Is this a cause for concern or an efficient response to growing incomes? 2. Are results in the literature arguing that household size can explain several patterns in the data (e.g. the life-cycle hump in consumption) robust to treating household size as an endogenous variable? 3. Do marriage institutions (e.g. polygyny) have aggregate effects? 4. What is the relationship between income and fertility? And is this relationship stable over time? 5. Is fertility too high in Africa and too low in Germany? To answer the questions posed above, the researcher will rely on the tools of modern macroeconomics and build quantitative models of fertility and household-size choice. Household formation, and in particular fertility, is an intertemporal decision, and hence the methodology of modern dynamic general equilibrium theory is a natural tool to study these topics. Using a general equilibrium model to study questions that are traditionally addressed by labor economists allows the investigation of feedback effects. For example, fertility decisions affect future aggregate labor supply and therefore, therefore, both the capital labor ratio and wages. The future wage - a measure of the expected well-being of the children - might in turn affect the incentives to have children. To study these models quantitatively, the proposed research employs data from a variety of sources. The main two micro data sets used are the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CEX) and the U.S. Census data. The CEX is an excellent source of detailed consumer spending data in the United States. The data will be used to calibrate a quantitative model of endogenous household size where a key benefit of living together is household-specific public goods (e.g. shelter). The CEX is available at no cost through the Stanford library. The Census data employed will be the 1850-2000 integrated public use microdata series (IPUMS) made available for free by the Minnesota Population Center. The integration provided through IPUMS makes the data comparable across years, which is desirable in a study of household changes over the centuries. Moreover, the researcher has extensive experience with this data set because she has worked at the Minnesota Population Center as a research assistant from June 2001 through September 2002. The Census data will be used to study changes in fertility rates and household size and composition over the last 150 years. The project is especially interested in how fertility relates to various measures of income, and whether this relationship has changed. Broader Impacts: To contribute to the optimal population debate, a theoretical "toolbox" is developed to analyze normative fertility issues. Two alternative generalizations of the notion of Pareto efficiency that apply to circumstances when fertility is endogenous are proposed. The researcher explores the theoretical properties of these concepts and employs them to shed light on the population debate. This work on efficient population growth provides an important tool for the policy debate on fertility and the optimal population growth rate.