Does being married bring you closer to your parents?
pe: Although some emphasize the integrative character of marriage, others argue that marriage undermines relations with extended kin, including aging parents. Utilizing NSFH data (N= 6,108), we find that married women and men have less intense intergenerational ties than the never married and the divorced: The married are less likely to live with parents, stay in touch, and give or receive emotional, financial, and practical help. These differences hold even when we control for structural characteristics, including time demands, needs…
1 min read
Are we wasting children’s time by giving them more homework?
llowing an identification strategy that allows us to largely eliminate unobserved student and teacher traits, we examine the effect of homework on math, science, English and history test scores for eighth grade students in the United States. Noting that failure to control for these effects yields selection biases on the estimated effect of homework, we find that math homework has a large and statistically meaningful effect on math test scores throughout our sample. However, additional homework in science, English and…
1 min read
Do we idealize parenthood to rationalize the extreme sacrifices it takes to raise a child?
though raising children has largely negative effects on parents’ emotional well-being, parenthood is often idealized as a uniquely emotionally rewarding role. We tested the hypothesis that belief in myths idealizing parenthood helps parents cope with the dissonance aroused by the high financial cost of raising children. In Study 1, parents endorsed the idealization of parenthood more when only the costs of parenting were made salient than when both the costs of parenting and the long-term benefits of having children were…
1 min read
Do companies pay women more if a male CEO has a daughter?
men's salaries are higher when the boss has a daughter Drawing on research in sociology and economics suggesting that fathers' gender-related attitudes and behaviors are shaped by the gender of their children, we hypothesize that having daughters prompts male CEOs to implement wage policies that are more equitable to female employees. To test this hypothesis, we use a 12-year panel of Danish workforce data and an empirical specification with CEO–employee fixed effects, creating a quasiexperimental setting whereby the gender of…
1 min read
Is bribing your kids to eat vegetables a good idea?
rents commonly use rewards to encourage children to eat healthfully, but this practice remains controversial because rewards are suspected of undermining children’s intrinsic motivation. A cluster-randomized trial examined children’s acceptance of a disliked vegetable over 12 daily taste exposures. These exposures were paired with a tangible reward, a social reward, or no reward, and the findings were compared with the results from a no-treatment control condition. Liking and intake of the vegetable were assessed in a free-choice consumption task at…
1 min read
Do couples prefer sons over daughters?
parents have preferences over the gender of their children, and if so, does this have negative consequences for daughters versus sons? In this paper, we show that child gender affects the marital status, family structure, and fertility of a significant number of American families. Overall, a first-born daughter is significantly less likely to be living with her father compared to a first-born son. Three factors are important in explaining this gap. First, women with first-born daughters are less likely…
2 minutes
Do the sexually promiscuous have more sons?
CKGROUND: The generalized Trivers-Willard hypothesis (gTWH) proposes that parents who possess any heritable trait which increases male reproductive success at a greater rate than female reproductive success in a given environment will have a higher-than-expected offspring sex ratio, and parents who possess any heritable trait which increases the female reproductive success at a greater rate than male reproductive success in a given environment will have a lower-than-expected offspring sex ratio. AIM: One heritable trait which increases the reproductive success of…
2 minutes
How important is legacy status in college admissions?
cording to the study, by Michael Hurwitz, a doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, applicants to a parent’s alma mater had, on average, seven times the odds of admission of nonlegacy applicants. Those whose parents did graduate work there or who had a grandparent, sibling, uncle or aunt who attended the college were, by comparison, only twice as likely to be admitted. And: Mr. Espenshade pointed out that legacy status is just one of many possible advantages.…
3 minutes
