Bio-social Determinants of Fertility & Related Behaviors

描述(申请人提供)：许多社会科学面临的一个当代挑战是将生物学方法和社会经济方法整合到一个更统一的框架中，该框架(A)承认生物天赋的作用，(B)承认心理特征和个人行为的生物中介差异，(C)同时从生命周期的角度为有意识和理性的决策保持可能的强大作用。与生育相关的行为是这种整合的主要候选者。因此，在拟议的项目中，我们将使用大规模的、基于人口的和纵向的丹麦双胞胎数据，关于生育率、与生育相关的行为和幸福感，以经验研究和理论上概念化生育和相关行为的生物社会决定因素。这些分析的数据将在拟议的项目过程中部分收集，但该项目的大部分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差异的遗传成分，包括对基因-环境相互作用和长期队列比较的调查；(2)将这种遗传贡献分解为不同的途径，如通过教育/人力资本积累、工会形成或劳动力市场参与；(3)使用MZ内部估计估计生育率、儿童质量投资、工会形成、劳动力参与的结构模型，以控制生物和其他天赋；(4)在控制了生物和其他天赋因素后，估计孩子(和婚姻)对主观幸福感和幸福感的贡献，以便更好地理解个人想要孩子的动机；(5)分析双胞胎对社会互动过程的生物影响，从而影响生育率、伙伴关系的形成和从孩子获得的幸福；以及(6)调查生双胞胎对后续家庭结果的影响，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、父母的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.