INTERACTION BETWEEN QUANTITY AND QUALITY OF CHILDREN
INTERACTION BETWEEN QUANTITY AND QUALITY OF CHILDREN
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DOI：
10.1086/260166
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发表时间：
1973-01-01
影响因子：
8.2
通讯作者：
LEWIS, HG
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
BECKER, GS;LEWIS, HG
研究人类生育能力的学生很早就意识到，一个家庭所生孩子的数量(数量)与孩子的“质量”之间可能存在某种特殊的关系，如果不是父母的话，其他人也会这样认为。人们只需引用在横截面和时间序列数据中经常观察到的每个家庭儿童数量和质量之间的负相关。十多年前，我们中的一个人(Becker 1960)强调了数量和质量之间相互作用对于理解生育力(数量)的重要性，我们高兴地注意到，本补编的大多数论文，特别是De Tray和Willis的论文，都强调了这种相互作用。一些经济学家认为，经常观察到的数量和质量之间的负关系是家庭效用函数中父母的消费或生活水平与其子女的消费或生活水平之间替代弹性较低的结果(参见，例如，Duesenberry 1960；Willis 1969)。德雷在这本书中采用的方法不同，但它对效用函数和家庭生产中数量和质量之间的替代做出了同样特殊的假设。我们想在这里争辩说，人们可以在很大程度上理解关于数量和质量之间的相互作用以及数量或质量的数据，而不是假设无论是在效用函数中还是在家庭生产中，数量和质量都比随机选择的任何两种商品更紧密地联系在一起。下面的分析是粗略和不完整的，主要是因为我们最近才发展了这一论点。
Students of human fertility have been aware for a long time that there may be some special relation between the number (quantity) of children ever born to a family and the" quality" of their children as perceived by others if not by the parents. One need only cite the negative correlation between quantity and quality of children per family so often observed in both cross-section and time-series data. One of us (Becker 1960) more than a decade ago stressed the importance for understanding fertility (quantity) of the interaction between quantity and quality, and we are pleased to note that this interaction is emphasized in most of the papers in this Supplement, especially those by De Tray and Willis. Some economists have argued that the negative relation between quantity and quality often observed is a consequence of a low substitution elasticity in a family's utility function between parents' consumption or level of living and that of their children (see, eg, Duesenberry 1960; Willis 1969). The approach followed by De Tray in this volume is different, but it makes equally special assumptions about the substitution between quantity and quality in the utility function and in household production.We want to argue here that one can go a long way toward understanding data on the interaction between quantity and quality as well as on quantity or quality alone without assuming that, either in the utility function or in household production, quantity and quality are more closely related than any two commodities chosen at random. The analysis that follows is sketchy and incomplete, mainly because we have only recently developed this line of argument.