Bio-social Determinants of Fertility & Related Behaviors

描述（申请人提供）：许多社会科学面临的当代挑战是将生物学和社会经济学方法整合到一个更统一的框架中，该框架（a）承认生物禀赋的作用，（B）承认心理特征和个人行为中生物介导的变化，和（c）同时保持从生命周期角度进行有意识和合理决策的可能强有力的作用。与生育有关的行为是这种整合的主要候选人。因此，在拟议的项目中，我们将使用大规模的，以人口为基础的和纵向的丹麦双胞胎数据的生育率，生育相关的行为和幸福的经验调查和理论概念化的生育率和相关行为的生物社会决定因素。这些分析的部分数据将在拟议的项目过程中收集，但该项目的大部分内容涉及丹麦双胞胎登记处已有的现有数据。 我们对这些数据的分析将（1）建立生育率和相关行为方差的遗传成分，包括对基因-环境相互作用和长期队列比较的研究;（2）将这种遗传贡献分解为不同的途径，例如通过教育/人力资本积累，工会组建或劳动力市场参与;（3）估计生育率、对儿童质量的投资、工会形成、劳动力参与的结构模型，这些模型使用MZ内估计来控制生物和其他禀赋;（4）估计儿童的贡献（和婚姻）主观幸福感和幸福感，在控制了生物和其他禀赋之后，（5）分析双胞胎社会互动过程中的生物学影响因素，这些因素影响生育能力、伙伴关系的形成和来自子女的幸福感;（6）研究双胞胎的“冲击”对随后的家庭结果的影响，以便在进化和经济分配模型中研究量子变化对儿童质量投资、父母人力资本积累和劳动力市场行为的影响。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): A contemporary challenge for many social sciences is the integration of biological and socioeconomic approaches in a more unified framework that (a) acknowledges the role of biological endowments, (b) recognizes biologically mediated variation in psychological characteristics and personal behaviors, and (c) maintains at the same time a possibly strong role for conscious and rational decision-making in a life-cycle perspective. Behaviors related to fertility are primary candidates for this integration. In the proposed project, we will therefore use large-scale, population-based and longitudinal Danish twin data on fertility, fertility related behaviors and well-being to empirically investigate and theoretically conceptualize bio-social determinants of fertility and related behaviors. The data for these analyses will be partially collected in the course of the proposed project, but much of the project involves existing data already available in the Danish Twin Registry. Our analyses of these data will (1) establish the genetic component of the variance in fertility and related behaviors, including investigations of gene-environment interactions and long-term cohort comparisons; (2) provide a decomposition of this genetic contribution into different pathways, such as through education/human capital accumulation, union formation or labor market participation; (3) estimate structural models for fertility, investments in child-quality, union-formation, labor force participation that control for biological and other endowments using within-MZ estimates; (4) estimate the contributions of children (and marriage) to subjective well-being and happiness, after controlling for biological and other endowments, in order to better understand the motivation of why individuals desire to have children; (5) analyze biological influences on social interaction processes among twins that affect fertility, partnership formation and happiness derived from children; and (6) investigate the impact of the "shock" of having twins on subsequent family outcomes in order to study the implications of quantum-variations on investments in child-quality, parent's human-capital accumulation and labor-market behavior within evolutionary and economic allocation models.