Macro Models of Household Formation and Fertility

该项目包括对生育率和家庭组成的宏观模式的研究。第一部分是关于家庭形成的研究。 其次，对生育率作为家庭规模的一个具体维度进行了分析。最后，制定了审查生育决定的规范框架。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，研究旨在更好地理解以下问题：1。为什么今天的人们比150年前生活在更小的家庭里？这是令人担忧的原因还是对收入增长的有效回应？2.文献中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驼峰）的结果是否足以将家庭规模视为内生变量？3.婚姻制度（如一夫多妻制）是否具有总体影响？4.收入和生育率之间的关系是什么？这种关系随着时间的推移而稳定吗？5.非洲的生育率太高而德国的生育率太低吗？为了回答上述问题，研究者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定量模型。家庭形成，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是一个自然的工具来研究这些问题。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，生育率决定影响未来的总劳动力供给，从而影响资本劳动率和工资。未来的工资-衡量孩子们预期的幸福-可能反过来影响生育孩子的动机。为了定量研究这些模型，拟议的研究采用了来自各种来源的数据。使用的两个主要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绝佳来源。这些数据将用于校准内生家庭规模的定量模型，其中居住在一起的关键好处是特定于家庭的公共产品（例如住房）。CEX可以通过斯坦福大学图书馆免费获得。所采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年综合公共使用微数据系列（IPUMS）。通过IPUMS提供的整合使数据具有跨年度可比性，这在研究几个世纪以来的家庭变化时是可取的。此外，研究人员对这一数据集有着丰富的经验，因为她从2001年6月到2002年9月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、家庭规模和组成的变化。 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：为了促进最佳人口辩论，开发了一个理论“工具箱”来分析规范生育问题。帕累托效率的概念，适用于生育率是内生的情况下，提出了两种替代的概括。研究人员探讨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.