BUSCADOR RECOLECTA

We propose an index to measure the degree of ability or desire of the population in a given country to have children, via an analysis of certain factors that may have a positive or negative influence on the fertility rate of that country. Using data for the twenty-eight countries of the European Union, and Principal Components Analysis, we construct the International Multidimensional Fertility Index as a combination of four dimensions: (1) Economy and family, (2) Attitudes and habits, (3) Work–Life Balance, and (4) Policy, along with nineteen distinct variables. We find that Denmark, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg are among the countries with the highest value of the index, and they also have high fertility rates within the EU. At the other end of the spectrum, Latvia, Cyprus, and Greece, are ranked in the last positions according to our index, countries that also present low values in their fertility rates. We also find a positive correlation between the value of our index and country fertility rates, an indication that our index may be capturing country differences in the conditions for bearing children, with higher values of the index indicating better conditions for childbirth and childrearing. To the extent that international data becomes available, our methodology will allow for the construction of international rankings, helpful in identifying cross-country differences in the conditions for fertility.

This paper proposes an index to measure the possibilities individuals have to balance their work and life spheres. Using data for 26 European countries, and principal components analysis, we compute the National Work–Life Balance Index as a combination of five dimensions: Time/Schedule, Work, Family, Health, and Policy. We find that Northern and Central European countries, such as Denmark, the Netherlands, Finland, and Sweden have a higher value of the National Work–Life Balance Index, compared to Southern and Western European countries, such as Spain, Greece, Portugal, Latvia, and Bulgaria. These results are consistent with existing literature showing that there is a lower proportion of individuals reporting difficulty balancing their work and household responsibilities in Northern countries, compared to other European countries. To the extent that international data becomes comparable, the National Work–Life Balance Index may help to guide public policies aimed at improving the work–life balance of individuals in countries that are comparatively worse off in this respect.

We study a structural functional equation that is directly related to the pointwise aggregation of a finite number of maps from a given nonempty set into another. First we establish links between pointwise aggregation and invariance properties. Then, paying attention to the particular case of aggregation operators of a finite number of real-valued functions, we characterize several special kinds of aggregation operators as strictly monotone modifications of projections. As a case study, we introduce a first approach of type-2fuzzy sets via fusion operators. We develop some applications and possible uses related to the analysis of properties of social evaluation functionals in social choice, showing that those functionals can actually be described by using methods that derive from this setting., This work has been supported by the research projects ECO2012-34828,
MTM2012-37894-C02-02, MTM2015-63608-P, TIN2013-47605-P, TIN2011-29520 (Spain) and the Research Services of the Public University of Navarre.

The existence of a continuous and order-preserving real-valued function, for the class of continuous and ordinal invariant total preorders, defined on the Banach space of all bounded real-valued functions, which are in turn defined on a given set Ω, is characterized. Whenever the total preorder is nontrivial, the type of representation obtained leads to a functional equation that is closely related to the concept of comparison meaningfulness, and is studied in detail in this setting. In particular, when restricted to the space of bounded and measurable real-valued functions, with respect to some algebra of subsets of Ω, we prove that, if the total preorder is also weakly Paretian, then it can be represented as a Choquet integral with respect to a {0,1}-valued capacity. Some interdisciplinary applications to measurement theory and social choice are also considered., This work has been partially supported by the research projects ECO2012-34828, MTM2012-37894-C02-02 and TIN2013-40765-P (Spain).

The Spanish Roma population have co-existed with the broader population of Spain, under the same laws and regulations for more than 500 years, but they exhibit very different fertility patterns. The aim of this paper is to determine whether there are factors other than income or education that can explain the larger number of children in Spanish Roma families. Our analysis reveals that the existence of a family business, which is highly labor-demanding, appears to be associated with parental decisions concerning the number of children. Since parental authority, in Roma families, holds sway over children even after their own marriage, the future labor contributions of children are particularly beneficial to the family business.

This paper analyses the relationship between health inequality and the time allocation decisions of workers in six European countries, deriving some important policy implications in the context of income tax systems, regulation of working conditions, and taxes on leisure activities. Using the Multinational Time Use Study, we find that a better perception of own health is associated with more time devoted to market work activities in all six countries and with less time devoted to housework activities for both men and women. However, the evidence for the associations between health and leisure is mixed. This study represents a first step in understanding cross-country differences in the relationship between health status and time devoted to a range of activities for workers, in contrast with other analyses that have mainly focused only on market work. A better understanding of these cross-country differences may help to identify the effects of public policy on inequalities in the uses of time.

Adolescent smoking is one of the most pressing public health problems. The objective of this paper is to analyse the influence of peer pressure on adolescent cigarette consumption. More concretely, we explore the significance and robustness of the peer effects using several estimation methods employed in the existing literature. On the basis of the data provided by the 2004 Spanish survey on drug use in the school population, we estimate the probability of being a smoker by two-stage models. The results reveal that when we use standard errors used in the literature the class peer variable appears to be significant. However, the class peer variable is not significant when we calculate more exigent standard errors, a result that is robust across all specifications. The paper suggests the need for a more cautious interpretation of the peer effects found previously in the literature until a deeper analysis confirms the robustness of the peer effects.

In terms of economics, individuals divorce if their expected gains from marriage fall short of their expected utility outside the current marriage, and children represent a marriage-specific type of investment, which generally increases the value of marriage for the spouses. However, children may also disrupt marital stability as they will induce dramatic changes into the household allocation of money and time. In particular, children conceived before or after first marriage may be valued differently by the spouses and this may lead to marital conflicts. It is difficult to assign a priori the direction of the effect of children on marriage stability, and causality may run either way, as couples who anticipate a separation are more likely to have fewer children than those who are happy together, while children born before first marriage may be associated with a lower marriage attachment of their parents. Here, we follow an empirical approach and take advantage of the richness of the data on pre-marital history from the 24 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth79, to estimate the effect of children conceived before or after first marriage on marital stability. We find a significant deterrent effect of young children conceived during first marriage to the likelihood of divorce, while children conceived before first marriage are found to have a disruptive effect on marital stability.

The emergence of cooperation among unrelated human subjects is a long-standing conundrum that has been amply studied both theoretically and experimentally. Within the question, a less explored issue relates to the gender dependence of cooperation, which can be traced back to Darwin, who stated that "women are less selfish but men are more competitive". Indeed, gender has been shown to be relevant in several game theoretical paradigms of social cooperativeness, including prisoner's dilemma, snowdrift and ultimatum/dictator games, but there is no consensus as to which gender is more cooperative. We here contribute to this literature by analyzing the role of gender in a repeated Prisoners' Dilemma played by Spanish high-school students in both a square lattice and a heterogeneous network. While the experiment was conducted to shed light on the influence of networks on the emergence of cooperation, we benefit from the availability of a large dataset of more 1200 participants. We applied different standard econometric techniques to this dataset, including Ordinary Least Squares and Linear Probability models including random effects. All our analyses indicate that being male is negatively associated with the level of cooperation, this association being statistically significant at standard levels. We also obtain a gender difference in the level of cooperation when we control for the unobserved heterogeneity of individuals, which indicates that the gender gap in cooperation favoring female students is present after netting out this effect from other socio-demographics factors not controlled for in the experiment, and from gender differences in risk, social and competitive preferences.

In this paper, we focus on the relationship between parents’ education and activities aimed at increasing the human capital of children (for example, educational childcare). Using time use surveys from Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia we find that in Mexico, Peru, and Colombia the level of education of both father and mother has a positive association with the time devoted to educational childcare, while in Ecuador only fathers’ level of education has a positive association with father’s time devoted to educational childcare. Furthermore, we find that the time devoted to educational childcare by parents is positively related in all four countries.

We propose an index to measure the degree of ability or desire of the population in a given country to have children, via an analysis of certain factors that may have a positive or negative influence on the fertility rate of that country. Using data for the twenty-eight countries of the European Union, and Principal Components Analysis, we construct the International Multidimensional Fertility Index as a combination of four dimensions: (1) Economy and family, (2) Attitudes and habits, (3) Work–Life Balance, and (4) Policy, along with nineteen distinct variables. We find that Denmark, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg are among the countries with the highest value of the index, and they also have high fertility rates within the EU. At the other end of the spectrum, Latvia, Cyprus, and Greece, are ranked in the last positions according to our index, countries that also present low values in their fertility rates. We also find a positive correlation between the value of our index and country fertility rates, an indication that our index may be capturing country differences in the conditions for bearing children, with higher values of the index indicating better conditions for childbirth and childrearing. To the extent that international data becomes available, our methodology will allow for the construction of international rankings, helpful in identifying cross-country differences in the conditions for fertility.

In this paper, we analyze the commuting behavior of workers in the United States, with a focus on the differences between employees and the self-employed. Using the American Time Use Survey for the years 2003–2014, our empirical results show that employees spend 7.22 more minutes per day commuting than their self-employed counterparts, which represents a difference of 17% of the average commuting time of employed workers. This is especially prevalent in non-metropolitan areas, and it also appears to depend on the size of the population of the area of residence. Our results suggest that there is a complex relationship between urban form and the commuting behavior of workers.

In the context of growing interest of individuals in the Internet, the literature has not paid attention to the uses of time for children, given the scarcity of appropriate data bases that provide accurate information. To partially cover this gap, we now provide here evidence of the time that children aged between 10 and 12 years dedicate to two online activities: computer communication and computer gaming. To that end, we estimate a simultaneous seemingly unrelated regressions (SUR) model with data from the Spanish Time Use Survey for 2009–2010. Results indicate that being female generates a positive influence on the time devoted to computer communication, and being male generates a positive influence on the time devoted to computer gaming. We also find that a greater number of family members with secondary studies generates a positive influence on the time spent on computer gaming. Children with better health spend more time on both of these activities and, finally, living in a larger city produces a positive effect on the time dedicated to computer gaming.

This paper analyzes the relationship between parents’ time devoted to housework and the time devoted to housework by their children. Using data for Germany and Spain from the Multinational Time Use Study, we find positive correlations between parents’ and children’s housework time, indicating that the more time parents devote to housework, the more time their children devote to housework. However, we find cross-country differences in these relationships. In Germany, both fathers’ and mothers’ housework is positively related to the time devoted to housework by their children, while in Spain this relationship only holds for fathers’ time. We also find that these results are not applicable to all subgroups of the population, as our analysis considering the labor force status and education of the parents yields mixed results.

A general characterization result of projective aggregation functions is shown, the proof of which makes use of the celebrated Arrow''s theorem, thus providing a link between aggregation functions theory and social choice theory. The result can be viewed as a generalization of a theorem obtained by Kim (1990) for real-valued aggregation functions defined on the n-dimensional Euclidean space in the context of measurement theory. In addition, two applications of the core theorem of the article are shown. The first is a simple extension of the main result to the context of multi-valued aggregation functions. The second offers a new characterization of projective bijection aggregators, thus connecting aggregation operators theory with social choice.

We analyze whether ef¿ciency wages operate in urban labor markets, within the framework proposed by Ross and Zenou, in whichshirking at work and leisure are assumed to be substitutes. We useunique data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) that allowus to analyze the relationships between leisure, shirking, commuting, employment, and earnings. We con¿rm that shirking and leisureare substitutes, and present an estimate of this relationship, representing the only empirical test of the relationship between a worker’stime endowment and shirking at work. Our ¿ ndings point to the existence of ef¿ciency wages in labor markets.

This article analyses the determinants of escaping poverty through education in Spain, with this being the country that, is among the top European countries regarding the percentage of the population affected by poverty. Specifically, the article studies the transmission of poverty over two generations by analysing the factors that affect the probability of having completed the secondary level of education. To that end, we use the conceptual Quantity–Quality model of Becker–Lewis, empirically estimated by using the Survey of Living Conditions (2011) provided by the Spanish Statistical Institute. Our results confirm the intergenerational transmission of poverty in Spain, in such a way that the probability that the respondent has completed secondary education is determined, although not exclusively, by the family conditions of the respondents during their teenage years.

We analyse how forced displacements caused by violent conflict are related to the wages of workers in Colombia. Using data from the Quality of Life Survey (2011–2014), we analyse the differences in wages between those forced by violence to move to other regions, and those who moved for other reasons. We apply Propensity Score Matching techniques to compare workers from the two groups, finding that forced displacement is related to decreases of between 10 and 29 per cent in the wages of males, and between 18 and 37 per cent in the wages of females, relative to their counterparts. Thus, forced displacements are related to poorer labour market outcomes in terms of wages.

We analyze cooperation of individuals in a family context, using a Public Good game. In a lab experiment, 165 individuals from 55 three-generation families (youth, parent, and grandparent) play a repeated Public Good game in three different treatments: one in which three members of the same family play each other (family), a second with the youth and two non-family members, while preserving the previous generational structure (inter-generational), and a third in which three randomly-selected players play each other (random). We find that all the age groups cooperate more when playing with relatives, indicating that family ties may have a positive relationship to contributions to the Public Good. We also find that this trend is more evident for the youths and the parents than for the grandparents. Furthermore, young individuals tend to cooperate less than older generations, especially in non-family treatments. Our results serve as evidence of the relationship between family ties and inter-generational cooperative behaviors.

Introduction: Millions of individuals commute every day in the US. Despite commuting has been shown to have negative consequences for workers, no evidence has been about how commuting is related to feelings in other episodes. We analyzed the relationship between the feelings reported by American workers throughout the day and the time devoted to commuting.
Methods: We used the Well-Being Module of the American Time Use Survey for the years 2010, 2012, and 2013, and analized the relationship between commuting duration and the feelings reported (e.g, . happiness, sadness, stress, fatigue and pain) in both commuting and non-commuting episodes.
Results: We found that more time spent on the daily commute was related to higher levels of fatigue and stress during commuting, while also being associated with higher levels of sadness and fatigue during activities of child care. In particular, we found that a 1% increase in the time devoted to commuting during the episode was related to increases of 12 percent and 13 percent of a standard deviation for stress and fatigue, while a 1% increase in the time devoted to commuting during the day was related to increases of 5 percent and 7 percent of one standard deviation in the levels of sadness and fatigue during child care activities.
Conclusions: Our results indicated that longer commutes may be related to higher levels of stress and fatigue of workers, which may in turn affect the quality of the time parents devote to caring for their children.

In this paper, we propose an algorithmic approach based on resampling and bootstrap techniques to measure the importance of a variable, or a set of variables, in econometric models. This algorithmic approach allows us to check the real weight of a variable in a model, avoiding the biases of classical tests, and to select the more relevant variables, or models, in terms of predictability, by reducing dimensions. We apply this methodology to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor data for the year 2014, to analyze the individual- and national-level determinants of entrepreneurial activity, and compare the results with a forward selection approach, also based on resampling
predictability, and a standard forward stepwise selection process. We find that our proposed techniques offer more accurate results, which show that innovation and new technologies, peer effects, the sociocultural environment, entrepreneurial education at University, R&D transfers, and the availability of government subsidies are among the most important predictors of entrepreneurial behavior.

This paper studies the impact of culture on the fertility behavior of teenage women in the US. To identify this effect, it took an epidemiological approach, exploiting the variations in teenage women's fertility rates by ancestral home country. Using three different databases (the US National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, the US National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, and the 2000 US Census), the results show that culture has quantitatively important effects on the fertility behavior of teenage women. This finding is robust to alternative specifications, to the introduction of a range of home country variables to proxy culture, and to the measurement of individual characteristics present when teenage women continue with a pregnancy to have a child.

This paper examines the effect of divorce law reforms on fertility using the history of legislation on divorce across Europe. Because the introduction of more liberal divorce laws permanently reduces the value of marriage relative to divorce, these permanent shocks should also affect the fertility decisions of individuals, to the extent that children are considered marriage-specific capital. Our results suggest that divorce liberalization has a negative and permanent effect on fertility. Divorce reforms have decreased the Total Fertility Rate by about 0.2. The magnitude of the effect is sizable, taking into account that the average Total Fertility Rate declined from 2.84 in 1960 to 1.66 in 2006. These findings are robust to alternative specifications and controls for observed (the liberalization of abortion and the availability of the birth-control pill, among others) and unobserved country-specific factors, as well as time-varying factors at the country level. Supplemental analysis, developed to understand the mechanisms through which divorce law reforms affect fertility, shows that both marital and out-of-wedlock fertility decline, but that the impact on marital fertility varies, depending on whether couples are married prior to or after the divorce law reforms, pointing to a selection effect on the composition of marriages.

By exploring in more detail the links existing among aggregation theory, measurement theory, and social choice, some new results concerning aggregation operators are shown. This interplay was earlier observed and studied by Luce and later developed by many others. Two characterizations of aggregation operators, closely related to projections, are provided, thus generalizing the existing literature on these topics. It is emphasized that no continuity assumptions are required in any of the stated results.

We study a structural functional equation that is directly related to the pointwise aggregation of a finite number of maps from a given nonempty set into another. First we establish links between pointwise aggregation and invariance properties. Then, paying attention to the particular case of aggregation operators of a finite number of real-valued functions, we characterize several special kinds of aggregation operators as strictly monotone modifications of projections. As a case study, we introduce a first approach of type-2 fuzzy sets via fusion operators. We develop some applications and possible uses related to the analysis of properties of social evaluation functionals in social choice, showing that those functionals can actually be described by using methods that derive from this setting.

We analyze the relationship between sex-ratios in the region of residence, and the time devoted to paid and unpaid work by couples in Mexico (2002, 2009, 2014), Peru (2010), Ecuador (2012), Colombia (2012, 2017) and Chile (2015). We find that sex-ratios are negatively related to the time devoted by women to paid work in Ecuador, and positively related to the time devoted by men to paid work in Mexico and Chile. In Colombia, sex-ratios are negatively related to the time devoted by men to unpaid work, while in Mexico and Peru they are negatively related to the time devoted by women to unpaid work. These results illustrate the importance of studying this topic in countries where the evidence is scarce, mainly due to limitations in the data.