Daniel A. Seiver

Trend and variation in the seasonality of U.S. fertility, 1947–1976

This paper documents the postwar pattern of seasonality of births, for the United States and its divisions, using a simple time-varying parameter model. Variations over time and over space in seasonality are analyzed. In general, the South exhibits the greatest seasonal variation, and the most dramatic changes in seasonality. In later sections the hypothesis that the spread of air conditioning is responsible for the postwar changes in seasonality is tested, and a link between hormones and seasonality is speculated upon. A final section has a short summary and several questions for future research.

Evaluations and Grades: A Simultaneous Framework

Using a simultaneous framework and on the basis of data for a single institution, the author concludes that the “oft reported positive effect of students expected grades on [student evaluation of teaching] in a single equation regression has been misinterpreted” and that “the link between grades and [student evaluations] works in the opposite direction: better faculty improve student performance.”

Seasonality of fertility: new evidence.

This paper presents evidence that the seasonal pattern of American fertility applies to nonwhites as well as whites. The patterns are also changing in the same way over time: the summer trough in births is shrinking in magnitude, and the spread of airconditioning, reducing the heat of summer, can explain this shrinkage. The summer hypothesis is further buttressed by evidence, for the total population, that summer temperature extremes can explain a significant portion of the variation around the seasonal trend, in both the North and South. These temperature-induced variations appear to be offset within seven months of their occurrence.

Education and Contraceptive Choice: A Conditional Demand Framework

A multiperiod model of fertility and contraceptive choice which considers unobserved differential preferences for the timing of births is formulated. Conventional and conditional demand equations for contraceptives are derived from the model and the relationships in each between female education birth intentions and the level of contraceptive efficiency are compared. Demand equations derived from the model conditioned on birth intentions were shown to be superior to conventional demand equations in testing some of the assumptions pertaining to the technology of contraceptives embedded in the utility-maximization framework. A weak test of the hypothesis that education lowers the (fixed) costs of information associated with new technologies as exemplified by the oral contraceptive was shown to be obtainable only from consistent estimates of conditional contraceptive choice demand parameters. As a consequence of the dual technological attributes of contraceptive methods if education affects both the costs of children and preference orderings over the spacing of births the education-contraceptive use association conditional on the number of intended children cannot be used to make welfare comparisons across households. The log-linear model in which contraceptives were categorized on the basis of their cost characteristics and simulatenous equations techniques were used to obtain estimates of the conditional demand equations for contraceptives based on data from the National Fertility Survey (1970). Estimates indicated that the education of the wife among households with identical fertility plans was significantly and positively associated with the adoption of the newer birth control methods in 1970 with quantitiative affects significantly greater than those indicated in reduced-form and inconsistently estimated conditional equations appearing in a priori studies. The results support the hypothesis that the relative magnitudes of fixed and variable contraceptive costs influence contraceptive decisions with the value of the wifes time an important component of the former and suggest that women with higher levels of education are more likely to use traditional contraceptive methods.

Foreign finance, wealth effects and economic development

In this paper a two-period model of the wealth effect of foreign capital flows on domestic investment in LDCs is developed. It is shown that the link between foreign capital flows and increases in domestic consumption is conditional on the productivity of the capital flow, repayment conditions and complementarity with domestic investment. Generalizations are made regarding the relative productivity and repayment terms of such broad categories of capital flows as unrequited transfers, direct investments and long-term flows to governments. The impact of variations in the terms on which foreign capital is received is related to the ‘wealth effect’ of the capital. The model is tested with pooled cross-section data for seventy countries in 1976 and 1977. Data limitations permit estimation of the effect of foreign finance on domestic investment only up to a monotonic transformation of the true values. Nevertheless, the hypothesized role of the wealth effect of the major categories of external finance can be tes...

Fredonia: A simulation model for teaching undergraduate development economics☆

Abstract This paper describes an interactive teaching tool for economic development which complements texts, readings, and lectures with some ‘hands-on’ experience in managing a highly stylized economy of a developing country. The simulation game is not difficult to learn, but is hard to ‘win’. It requires only minuscule understanding of computers, is quite small and inexpensive to operate, and is written in ANSI Fortran to maximize portability. The workings of the simulated economy are described in terms of ‘lessons’ of development.

Using Value Line’s Median Appreciation Potentialto Forecast Long-Horizon Market Returns

Over the last twenty-five years, there has been extensive research devoted to the study of long-horizon stock return predictability. The potential predictability of long-horizon stock movements is clearly important for wealth managers, institutional investors, and economic policy makers. This is particularly true for investors with an investment horizon of five to 10 years (and beyond in many cases), which characterizes the investment approach of many long-term portfolios. This article shows that a rarely researched valuation measure, the Value Line Median Appreciation Potential (MAP), can also be used to reliably forecast long-horizon stock market movements. It then goes beyond many forecasting papers to show that the long-horizon forecasting ability of MAP can be used to construct a portfolio superior to buy-and-hold.

Misperceptions of reproductive ideals among American husbands and wives

In this paper data from the Michigan Time Use Survey are used to document the extent of misperceptions of reproductive ideals among couples. Perceptual errors of spouses are found to be common and also nonrandom. The errors are influenced by a variety of socioeconomic variables. The paper concludes that research on fertility intentions and contraceptive use-effectiveness, which uses wife-only data, may be flawed. The paper also speculates on the extent and quality of marital communication.

A reply to W. Hicks's comments.

Abstract W. Whitney Hickss comments on my paper(1) can be reduced to four major points, all of which I dispute wholeheartedly: