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The causal relationship between African American fertility and female labor supply: Policy implications

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The Review of Black Political Economy

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Notes

  1. See D. Bell, “Why Do Participation Rates of Black and White Wives Differ?”Journal of Human Resources 9 (1974): 465–479. This article is dated, yet it has become a classic work in the analysis of racial differences in female labor participation.

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  2. See H. V. Hayghe, and S. M. Bianchi, “Married Mothers’ Work Patterns: The Job-Family Compromise,”Monthly Labor Review, 117 (1994): 24–30; S. M. Bianchi, “Changing Economic Roles of Women and Men,” in R. Farley (ed.)State of the Union: America in the 1990s, Vol. I (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1995): 107–154; B. Woody,Black Women in the Workplace: Impact of Structure Change in the Economy (New York: Greenwood Press, 1992).

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  3. See E. P. Hoffman, “Fertility and Female Employment,”Quarterly Review of Economics and Business 25 (1985): 85–95; E, Lehrer, “The Impact of Children on Married Women’s Labor Supply—Black-White Differentials Revisited,”Journal of Human Resources, 27 (1992): 422–444.

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  4. C. W. A. Granger, “Testing for Causality,”Journal of Economic Dynamic and Control 4, (1980): 229–252.

  5. C. Hsiao, “Autoregressive Modeling and Money Income Causality Detection,”Journal of Monetary Economics 7 (1981): 85–106; C. W. J. Granger, “Investigating Causal Relation by Econometric and Cross-Sectional Method,”Econometrica 37 (1969): 424–438. B. S. Cheng, “An Investigation of Cointegration and Causality between Fertility and Female Labor Participation,”Applied Economics Letters 3 (1996): 29–32.

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  6. Granger, ibid.

  7. W. G. Bowen and T. A. Finegan,The Economics of Labor Force Participation (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1969). This is an extensive and in-depth study, both theoretically and empirically, on the subject of labor force participation.

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  10. Hsiao, “; Cheng, op. cit.

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  11. Stationary process is such that the mean, the variance, and the covariances of the error term do not change over time. If economic data are stationary, it can be thought of as “nicely behaved.” Most economic data are trending; that is, the mean changes over time and thus clearly cannot be stationary. One difficulty that arises when employing regression with clearly non-stationary series is the spurious problem that is particularly likely when the adjusted coefficient of determination (R2) exceeds the D-W statistic. High R2s may only indicate correlated trends and not true economic relationships while low D-W statistics may reflect nonstationary residuals. In such situations, the usual ordinary least squares significance tests performed on the regression coefficients can be quite misleading. Therefore, it is important to test for stationarity before proceeding with the causality estimation. See D. N. Gujarati,Basic Econometrics (New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1996), 709–730; C. W. J. Granger and P. Newbold, Spurious Regressions in Econometrics,“Journal of Econometrics, 2(1974): 111–120.

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  14. Standard Granger or Sims tests are valid only if the original time series are not cointegrated. See C. W. J. Granger, “Some Recent Developments in a Concept of Causality,”Journal of Econometrics, 2(1988): 199–211.

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  15. Cramer poses the question that many of the major controversies in the study of female labor force participation and fertility involve questions of causal direction. See J. Cramer, “Fertility and Female Employment: Problems of Causal Direction,”American Sociological Review 45 (1980): 167–190. Cheng finds a causality runs unidirectionally from BR to FR with no feedback using the total population samples. See Cheng, op. cit.

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  16. Hoffman, op. cit.“; Badgett, M. V. L. “Rising Black Unemployment: Changes in Job Stability or in Employ ability,”Review of Black Political Economy 22 (1994): 55–76.

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  19. See S. Lundberg, “Labor Supply of Husbands and Wives: A Simultaneous Equations Approach,”Review of Economics and Statistics, 70 (1988): 224–233.

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  20. B. M. Fleisher and G. F. Rhodes, Jr., “Fertility, Women’s Wage Rates, and Labor Supply,”American Economic Review (1979), 14-24; Bianchi, op. cit. Zhan finds that black women’s increase in labor participation during the 1970–1990 period was mainly attributed to changes in education, marriage, and fertility. See L. Zhan, “Family Demographic Change and Labor Force Participation of Black and White Women, 1970-1990,” Manuscript, Population Research Center, Pennsylvania State University.

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  24. T. Larson argues that “only among blacks does income variable perform as predicted by standard economic theory and it is significant only when the discrimination variable is included.” See his article (page 66), “The Effect of Discrimination and Segregation on Black Male Migration,”Review of Black Political Economy, 20 (1992).

  25. R. B. Hill, “Economic Forces, Structural Discrimination and Black Family Instability,”Review of Black Political Economy, 17 (1989): 5–123; Woody, op. cit.

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  26. C. W. Remiers, “Cultural Differences in Labor Force Participation Among Married Women,”American Economic Review, 75 (1985): 251–255. Remiers finds in his study that among the U. S.-born Asian and black wives, the entire difference from U.S.-born whites is due to direct cultural effects on the parameters of the FR function, which account for a 12 to 13 point gap; also see B. Jones, “Black Women and Labor Force Participation: An Analysis of Sluggish Growth Rates,” pp. 11–31 in M. C. Simms and J. M. Malveaux (eds.)Slip** Through the Cracks: The Status of Black Women (New Brunswick, N. J.: Transaction Books, 1986).

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  28. W. A. Fuller,Introduction to Statistical Time Series (New York: John Wiley, 1976): 371–373.

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  1. Benjamin S. Cheng
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Cheng, B.S. The causal relationship between African American fertility and female labor supply: Policy implications. The Review of Black Political Economy 25, 77–88 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02690069

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