Department of Economics
University of California, Berkeley
August 20, 2008
Field Exam for Economic Demography
Please answer all parts of all questions, which will be weighted in the total grade as
indicated in parentheses. Cite the literature where appropriate. You have three hours.
1. (25) Discuss the treatment of investment in children in Chayanov, in the Quantity-
Quality theory of fertility, and in an altruistic analysis of investment in children. Explain
why parents may choose to invest less than the efficient amount in the education of their
children in the altruistic case. What is a convenient indirect indicator of whether optimal
investment in children has occurred in a given family? (For present purposes investment
in children is the same as expenditures on children or transfers to children; if you prefer
to distinguish among them, explain your distinctions.)
2. (25) In a recent article, Borjas claims that analysis of the effects of immigration on the
wages of domestic workers is best carried out at the national level rather than at the level
of local labor markets. Explain the basis for this claim, and sketch his strategy for the
national analysis. What is Card’s view about whether analysis of local labor markets is
helpful in this regard, and what evidence does he present in support of his view?
3. We are interested in assessing mortality and fertility and projecting the female
population of Thailand.
a) There were 12,574 deaths to infant girls below the age of 1 in 1998 and the number of
girls below the age of 1 at mid-year was about 459,000. There were about 470,000
female births during the year. Assuming a radix of 100,000, the lifetable person-years
lived between the ages of 1 and 10 is about 9L1 = 863,000. Calculate the lifetable
probability of dying before the age of 1 and the lifetable person-years lived between ages
zero and ten.
b) The following 5 by 5 dimensional Leslie Matrix with n=10-year-wide age groups is
designed for projecting the female population of Thailand forward in steps of 10 years
each. In 1998 there were 5.489 million girls aged zero to ten, 5.709 million young women
aged ten to twenty, 5.271 million women aged twenty to thirty, 4.366 million women
aged thirty to forty, 2.957 million women aged forty to fifty, and 4.483 million women
over fifty.
0.0535 0.3173 0.3749 0.1274 0.0216
0.9910 0.0000 0.0000 0.0000 0.0000
0.0000 0.9838 0.0000 0.0000 0.0000
0.0000 0.0000 0.9781 0.0000 0.0000
0.0000 0.0000 0.0000 0.9723 0.0000
