Correction: Does bribery increase maternal mortality? Evidence from 135 Sub-Saharan African regions.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgph.0000847.].

Long-term impact of parenting-related leave policies on adolescents' well-being: a systematic review of quasi-experiments.

BACKGROUND: Parenting-related leave policies have gained increasing endorsement across Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries in recent decades. Previous reviews have focused on the short-term impacts and found predominantly positive effects on children. Although there is a growing interest in the long-term impact during adolescence and young adulthood, a comprehensive assessment of this aspect is currently lacking. METHODS: We systematically reviewed studies from three electronic databases (Scopus, Web of Science and PubMed), which used quasi-experimental design and examined policies legislating the introduction or expansion of parenting-related leave policies in North America or Europe. We looked at studies focused on well-being beyond the age of 12 and analyzed the findings across different domains of well-being: health, education and labour market outcomes. RESULTS: The quasi-experimental evidence is rather limited. The introduction of leave policies or gender-specific quotas produces substantial benefits in the long run. Further, maternal socioeconomic and educational background appears to play a substantial moderating role between leave and adolescents' well-being. Adolescents with mothers who have higher levels of education have demonstrated a more pronounced advantage from the extended time spent together, thereby accentuating pre-existing disparities. CONCLUSIONS: Though the expansion of already long leaves might not generate significant outcomes, the introduction of leave policies or gender-specific quotas produces substantial long-term benefits. This evidence entails considerable policy implications for countries that lack a national leave policy or offer only short durations of paid leave, such as the USA.

Family ideals in an era of low fertility.

Taking stock of individuals' perceived family ideals is particularly important in the current moment given unprecedented fertility declines and the diversification of households in advanced industrial societies. Study participants in urban China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, the United States, Italy, Spain, and Norway were asked to evaluate vignettes describing families whose characteristics vary on ten dimensions. In contrast to previous studies that focused on a single dimension, such as fertility ideals or gender roles, this holistic vignette approach identifies the relative importance of each dimension. Multilevel regression analysis reveals both expected and unexpected findings. Parenthood remains a positive ideal, but the number of children does not matter once other family dimensions are considered, a potentially important finding in light of conventional wisdom regarding the two-children ideal. When evaluating families with at least one child, respondents tend to positively evaluate more traditional arrangements, including valuing marriage relative to cohabitation and, particularly, divorce. Also, in addition to financial resources, good communication between immediate and extended family members, as well as maintaining respect in the larger community, are highly salient attributes of an ideal family. Notwithstanding some important cross-national differences, egalitarian gender roles and avoiding work-family conflict are also valued positively. Overall, even as the study reveals some notable variations between societies, respondents across countries identify similar components of an ideal family.

Social and political trust diverge during a crisis.

This study shows that social and political trust may diverge in the face of shared threats, and that this pattern is driven by negative information about crisis management. Leveraging a three-wave panel survey and an information-provision experiment in the USA during the COVID-19 crisis, our research reveals that negative perceptions of pandemic management lead to a decline in political trust and a parallel increase in social trust. This dynamic is pronounced among government supporters, who, confronted with COVID-19 challenges, experience a substantial erosion of political trust. Simultaneously, there is a notable rise in social trust within this group. Our analysis suggests that, as government supporters attributed more responsibility for the crisis to their political leader, political trust was supplanted by social trust. Disenchanted voters, feeling let down by institutions, sought support in society. Both the survey and the experiment underscore that societal shocks can prompt individuals to shift from relying on formal institutions to informal ones as a coping strategy. This research contributes a generalizable framework explaining how negative perceptions of crisis management can lead societies to substitute political trust with social trust, advancing our understanding of societal responses to shared threats and adaptive strategies during crises.

Does bribery increase maternal mortality? Evidence from 135 Sub-Saharan African regions.

About 295,000 women died globally during and following pregnancy and childbirth in 2017. Two-thirds of these deaths occurred in Sub-Saharan Africa. By linking individual and regional data from 135 regions in 17 Sub-Saharan African countries over the period 2002-2018 this study explores how bribery affects maternal mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa. Our results show that the percentage of people who had first-hand experience in bribery is significantly and positively associated with pregnancy related deaths. We find that a 10 p.p. increase in the prevalence of bribery is associated with up to 41 [95% CI: 10-73] additional deaths for every 1,000 pregnancy-related deaths. However, the healthcare system quality appears to be an important moderator. To reduce maternal mortality, policy makers should not only increase investments in healthcare, they need also to implement measures to combat corruption.

Information and vaccine hesitancy: Evidence from the early stage of the vaccine roll-out in 28 European countries.

The success of mass vaccination programs against SARS-CoV-2 hinges on the public's acceptance of the vaccines. During a vaccine roll-out, individuals have limited information about the potential side-effects and benefits. Given the public health concern of the COVID pandemic, providing appropriate information fast matters for the success of the campaign. In this paper, time-trends in vaccine hesitancy were examined using a sample of 35,390 respondents from the Eurofound's Living, Working and COVID-19 (LWC) data collected between 12 February and 28 March 2021 across 28 European countries. The data cover the initial stage of the vaccine roll-out. We exploit the fact that during this period, news about rare cases of blood clots with low blood platelets were potentially linked to the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine (or Vaxzeveria). Multivariate regression models were used to analyze i) vaccine hesitancy trends, and whether any trend-change was associated with the link between the AstraZeneca vaccine ii) and blood clots (AstraZeneca controversy), and iii) the suspension among several European countries. Our estimates show that vaccine hesitancy increased over the early stage of the vaccine roll-out (0·002, 95% CI: [0·002 to 0·003]), a positive shift took place in the likelihood of hesitancy following the controversy (0·230, 95% CI: [0·157 to 0·302]), with the trend subsequently turning negative (-0·007, 95% CI: [-0·010 to -0·005]). Countries deciding to suspend the AstraZeneca vaccine experienced an increase in vaccine hesitancy after the suspensions (0·068, 95% CI: [0·04 to 0·095]). Trust in institutions is negatively associated with vaccine hesitancy. The results suggest that SARS-CoV-2 vaccine hesitancy increased steadily since the beginning of the vaccine roll-out and the AstraZeneca controversy and its suspension, made modest (though significant) contributions to increased hesitancy.

The association between COVID-19 policy responses and mental well-being: Evidence from 28 European countries.

This study assesses how the implementation and lifting of non-pharmaceutical policy interventions (NPIs), deployed by most governments, to curb the COVID-19 pandemic, were associated with individuals' mental well-being (MWB) across 28 European countries. This is done both for the general population and across key-groups. We analyze longitudinal data for 15,147 respondents from three waves of the Eurofound-"Living, Working and COVID-19" survey, covering the period April 2020-March 2021. MWB is measured by the WHO-5 index. Our evidence suggests that restriction on international travel, private gatherings, and contact tracing (workplace closures) were negatively (positively) associated with MWB by about, respectively, -0.63 [95% CI: -0.79 to -0.47], -0.24 [95% CI: -0.38 to -0.10], and -0.22 [95% CI: -0.36 to -0.08] (0.29 [95% CI: 0.11 to 0.48]) points. These results correspond to -3.9%, -1.5%, and -1.4% (+1.8%) changes compared to pre-pandemic levels. However, these findings mask important group-differences. Women compared to men fared worse under stay-at-home requirements, internal movement restrictions, private gatherings restrictions, public events cancellation, school closures, and workplace closures. Those residing with children below 12, compared to those who do not, fared worse under public events cancellation, school closures and workplace closures. Conversely, those living with children 12-17, compared to those who do not, fared better under internal movement restrictions and public events cancelling. Western-Europeans vis-à-vis Eastern-Europeans fared better under NPIs limiting their mobility and easing their debts, whereas they fared worse under health-related NPIs. This study provides timely evidence of the rise in inequalities during the COVID-19 pandemic and offers strategies for mitigating them.

Was Banfield right? New insights from a nationwide laboratory experiment.

Since the pioneering study by Banfield, the North-South gap in Italian social capital has been considered by international scholars as an example of how cultural diversity within a country can generate different developmental outcomes. Most studies, however, suffer from limited external validity and measurement error. This paper exploits a new and representative online lab-experiment to assess social-capital patterns in Italy. Unlike previous experiments, we do not inform participants about the geographic origins of their counterparts. This feature allows us to assess the North-South gap in universal, as opposed to parochial, behavior. Results suggest that Southerners and Northerners do not systematically differ in generalized prosocial preferences. Only trustworthiness is higher among. Northerners, while they are statistically similar to Southerners in many other economic preferences such as cooperation, trust, expected trustworthiness, altruism, and risk tolerance. We also show that the gap in trustworthiness stems from the lower reciprocity of Southerners in response to large transfers, and it is characterized by the intergenerational transmission of norms. Possible policy implications are discussed.

A first glance into the black box of life satisfaction surrounding childbearing.

The vast majority of studies looking into the relationship between childbearing and subjective well-being use overall measures where respondents either report their general level of happiness or their life satisfaction, leaving substantial doubt about the underlying mechanisms. However, life satisfaction and happiness are intuitively multidimensional concepts, simply because there cannot be only one aspect that affects individuals' well-being. In this study, by considering seventeen specific life satisfaction domains, these features come out very clearly. Whereas all the domains considered matter for the overall life satisfaction, only three of them, namely satisfaction with leisure, health and satisfaction with the partnership, change dramatically surrounding childbearing events. Even though we cannot generalise (since these results stem from one particular panel survey, i.e., Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia data), it appears that the typical anticipation and post-child decrease of life satisfaction, so often found in existing studies, stems from changes in these three domains.

Early assessment of the relationship between the COVID-19 pandemic and births in high-income countries.

Drawing on past pandemics, scholars have suggested that the COVID-19 pandemic will bring about fertility decline. Evidence from actual birth data has so far been scarce. This brief report uses data on vital statistics from a selection of high-income countries, including the United States. The pandemic has been accompanied by a significant drop in crude birth rates beyond that predicted by past trends in 7 out of the 22 countries considered, with particularly strong declines in southern Europe: Italy (-9.1%), Spain (-8.4%), and Portugal (-6.6%). Substantial heterogeneities are, however, observed.

Epidemics and trust: The case of the Spanish Flu.

Recent studies argue that major crises can have long-lasting effects on individual behavior. While most studies focused on natural disasters, we explore the consequences of the global pandemic caused by a lethal influenza virus in 1918-19: the so-called "Spanish Flu." This was by far the worst pandemic of modern history, causing up to 100 million deaths worldwide. Using information about attitudes of respondents to the General Social Survey, we find evidence that experiencing the pandemic likely had permanent consequences in terms of individuals' social trust. Our findings suggest that lower social trust was passed on to the descendants of the survivors of the Spanish Flu who migrated to the United States. As trust is a crucial factor for long-term economic development, our research offers a new angle from which to assess current health threats.

Trust and fertility in uncertain times.

Recent studies have shown higher uncertainty to be associated with fertility decline. This study considers the role of social trust as a coping mechanism when general uncertainty increases. We analyse the fertility data of Italian provinces from 2004 to 2013, thereby incorporating the period of economic recession, which unexpectedly and exogenously increased uncertainty across the population. We find a robust and significantly positive impact of social trust on fertility, which is stronger among younger age groups. Moreover, we find that the buffer effect of trust decreases with the level of public childcare provision, suggesting that low trust endowments may be counterbalanced through public policy.

How the internet increases modern contraception uptake: evidence from eight sub-Saharan African countries.

BACKGROUND: Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries have the highest worldwide levels of unmet need for modern contraception. This has led to persistently high fertility rates in the region, rates which have had major adverse repercussions on the development potential there. Family planning programmes play a key role in improving the uptake of modern contraception, both by fostering women's health and by lowering their fertility. Increasing awareness of contraception benefits is a major component of such programmes. Here, we ask whether internet access can bridge the gap between women's need for modern contraception and women's uptake of the same. METHODS: We use a compendium of data for 125 242 women, aged 15-49, from the Demographic Health Survey, Akamai and International Communication Union data, covering eight SSA countries, for the period 2014-2019. We apply a Two-Stage Least Square model, using as instruments for individual internet exposure the distance to the main server in the country and whether the backbone network in the country has been connected to at least one submarine cable. RESULTS: Internet exposure, measured as women access the internet at least monthly (almost daily), is associated with a positive, 11.4% (95% CI 10.6% to 12.2%) (53.8% (95% CI 13.4% to 94.1%)), increase in modern contraception uptake. Education is an important moderator. Poorly educated women benefit the most from internet exposure. DISCUSSION: Internet exposure appears to have significantly increased the uptake of modern contraception among sub-Saharan women. The poorly educated appear particularly to benefit. There are two mechanisms at play: the internet increases women's knowledge of contraception; and, in parallel, fosters their empowerment.

Trust and Fertility Dynamics.

We argue that the divergence in fertility trends in advanced societies is influenced by the interaction of long-standing differences in generalized trust with the increase in women's educational attainment. Our argument builds on the idea that trust enhances individuals' and couples' willingness to outsource childcare to outside their extended family. This becomes critically important as women's increased education enhances the demand for combining work and family life. We test our hypothesis using data from the World Values Survey and European Values Study on 36 industrialized countries between the years 1981 and 2009. Multilevel statistical analyses reveal that the interaction between national-level generalized trust and cohort-level women's education is positively associated with completed fertility. As education among women expands, high levels of generalized trust moderate fertility decline.

It Takes Two to Tango: Couples' Happiness and Childbearing.

The existing literature has so far considered the role of the individual's subjective well-being on fertility, neglecting the importance of the partner's well-being. Using data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and event history models estimated separately by parity, we find that in a couple, women's happiness matters more than that of the male partner in terms of having the first child. Specifically, we observe that couples in which either partner is happier than usual are more at risk of having the first child, but the effect is stronger with higher happiness of the woman. For the transition to the second child, we find that couples in which the woman declares to be happier or less happy than usual have a lower risk of childbirth. We, moreover, find support for a multiplicative effect of partners' SWB on the decision to have a first child. Our results show that failing to acknowledge that the subjective well-being of both partners matters for the inherently joint decision making of childbearing can lead to an incomplete view of how subjective well-being affects fertility.

Diffusion of childbearing within cohabitation.

The article analyzes the diffusion of childbearing within cohabitation in Norway, using municipality data over a 24-year period (1988-2011). Research has found substantial spatial heterogeneity in this phenomenon but also substantial spatial correlation, and the prevalence of childbearing within cohabitation has increased significantly over time. We consider several theoretical perspectives and implement a spatial panel model that allows accounting for autocorrelation not only on the dependent variable but also on key explanatory variables, and hence identifies the key determinants of diffusion of childbearing within cohabitation across space and over time. We find only partial support for the second demographic transition as a theory able to explain the diffusion of childbearing within cohabitation. Our results show that at least in the first phase of the diffusion (1988-1997), economic difficulties as measured by increased unemployment among men contributed to the diffusion of childbearing within cohabitation. However, the most important driver for childbearing within cohabitation is expansion in education for women.

Psychological distress of marital and cohabitation breakups.

Using data from a large survey, the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), this paper explores the extent to which marital and cohabiting unions differ with respect to the short-term effects of union dissolution on mental health. We compare married individuals who divorced or separated with cohabitors whose first union ended and test the hypothesis that married individuals experience larger negative effects. Results show that initial differences are not statistically significant once the presence of children is controlled for, suggesting that the presence of children is a particularly significant source of increased psychological distress in union dissolutions. However, parenthood does not explain serious psychological distress, which appears to be associated with enduring traits (the personality trait neuroticism).

The impact of economic resources on premarital childbearing and subsequent marriage among young American women.

This paper extends previous work on premarital childbearing by modeling both the entry rates and the exit rates of unwed motherhood among young American women. In particular, I investigate the impact of economic resources on the likelihood of experiencing a premarital birth and then of subsequent marriage. Using a multiple-destination, multiple-spell hazard regression model and a microsimulation analysis, I analyze the accumulating effects of various economic variables. The results show that the economic resources are indeed important both for premarital childbearing and for subsequent marriage. However, the simulations show that large changes in these economic variables do not necessarily translate into large changes in nonmarital childbearing.

Changing patterns of Mongolian fertility at a time of social and economic transition.

In 1989, after a long period of socialist rule, Mongolia initiated a democratization process of its political system together with a transition toward a market economy. This study examines how changes in socioeconomic conditions in Mongolia have affected fertility patterns in recent times. It also provides an outline of changes that have taken place in terms of pronatalist policies. Data are drawn from the Reproductive Health Survey of Mongolia conducted in 1998. Among the older cohort, the relationship between economic activity and fertility is inverse but weak, whereas among the younger cohort, the economic downturn has had a strongly depressing effect on fertility. Important effects of micro-level variables, including education and housing, are also noted. The findings suggest that the fertility decline observed for the older cohorts is part of the first demographic transition, in which the collapse of pronatalist policies was influential.