ECONOMIC AND STATISTICAL MODELS OF LIFE-CYCLE FERTILITY

这个项目将调查生育率如何在生命周期中进行调整 对家庭累积的人口统计事件的反应。的一大部分 研究工作将致力于新技术的开发和测试 分析危险率的方法。主要创新之处在于 早期的方法是使用离散时间框架，即 明确纳入重要的生物决定因素，以及 对异质性和内生性的修正。蒙特的集约化使用 在开发经验模型的过程中进行卡洛实验将 极大地提高了估计的可解释性。 尽管方法论上的改进在 许多应用，本项目将主要局限于研究 法国农村的生育率转变。自然生育力假说 可以简化为关于 家庭建设，而不涉及家庭以外的任何变量 人口统计历史。这个项目中开发的方法是独一无二的 非常适合充分利用生育史。家庭 重建数据，就像研究所为法国构建的那样 国家人口统计和以前工作中使用的到现在 调查人员，提供丰富和相对完整的数据 生育史，一般没有任何额外信息。在……里面 结合在一起，这里要使用的数据和方法将产生强大的 对生育假说的检验。当与其他组件结合使用时 将生育史与其他变量联系起来的数据集，新方法 可以测试关于行为和生物学的更具体的理论 生育率的决定因素。

This project will investigate how fertility adjusts over the life cycle in response to the family's accumulated demographic events. A major part of the research effort will be devoted to the development and testing of new methodologies for the analysis of hazard rates. The main innovations over earlier methodologies are the use of a discrete time framework, the explicit incorporation of important biological determinants, and corrections for heterogeneity and endogeneity. Intensive use of Monte Carlo experiments during the development of the empirical model will greatly improve the interpretability of estimates. Although the methodological improvements will be of considerable value in many applications, this project will mainly be confined to a study of fertility transition in rural France. The hypothesis of natural fertility can be reduced to testable assertions about the internal dynamics of family-building, without reference to any variables outside the family's demographic history. The methods developed in this project are uniquely well-suited to making full use of fertility histories. Family reconstitution data, like that constructed for France by the Institut National d'Etudes Demographiques and used in previous work by the present investigators, provide abundant and comparatively complete data on fertility histories, generally without any additional information. In combination, the data and methods to be used here will produce powerful tests of the fertility hypothesis. When used in combination with other data sets linking fertility histories to other variables, the new methods can test more specific theories about the behavioral and biological determinants of fertility.