Naming the Precious Child: Fertility Decline and the Value of Children
2015/11/10
研討會日期 : 2015-11-10
時間 : 14:30
主講人 : Professor Joshua R. Goldstein
主持人 : Professor Tzu-Ting Yang
地點 : Conference Room B110
演講者簡介 : Professor Goldstein received his Ph.D. in Demography from University of California, Berkeley in 1996. He is currently Chancellor’s Professor of Demography at University of California at Berkeley. His research fields are Social demography, Economic demography, Formal demography and quantitative methods, Fertility Family Demography, and Historic Demography.
演講摘要 : Baby naming offers an opportunity to see into the minds of parents. Over the course of the demographic transition, investments in children grew as family sizes shrunk. In this paper, we show that the names given to the first born are predictive of family size. Part of this result is due to the effects of class on both naming and family size. But even controlling for family background as best we can, it appears that names are still predictive of family size. Our findings help us to understand the fertility transition as an intentional and planned process. While structural and economic changes are helpful in explaining much of the fertility transition, they leave much individual variation unexplained. The names given to children provide a unique and potentially valuable perspective on family size preferences, allowing us to introduce new measures with the traditional statistical modeling of the determinants of fertility. We apply our approach to the United States in 1900, in the midst of that country’s demographic transition. However, our methods are quite general, and can be applied in many contexts, including historical and contemporary Taiwan.
