Guy Stecklov

• Ph.D. in Demography
• Professor (Full) at University of British Columbia and Hebrew University (on leave)

The balance of men and women in society, captured by sex ratios, determines key social and demographic phenomena. Previous research has explored sex ratios mainly at birth and up to age five at national level, whereas we address rural-urban gaps in sex ratios for all ages. Our measures are based on the United Nations data on rural and urban populat...

Can the names parents gave their children give us insights into how parents in historical times planned their families? In this study, we explore whether the names given to the firstborn child can be used as indicators of family-size preferences and, if so, what this reveals about the emergence of intentional family planning over the course of the...

The international migration of researchers is an important dimension of scientific mobility, and has been the subject of considerable policy debate. However, tracking the migration life courses of researchers is challenging due to data limitations. In this study, we use Scopus bibliometric data on eight million publications from 1.1 million researc...

The international migration of researchers is an important dimension of scientific mobility, and has been the subject of considerable policy debate. However, tracking the migration life courses of researchers is challenging due to data limitations. In this study, we use Scopus bibliometric data on eight million publications from 1.1 million researc...

Germany has become a major country of immigration, as well as a research powerhouse in Europe. As Germany spends a higher fraction of its GDP on research and development than most countries with advanced economies, there is an expectation that Germany should be able to attract and retain international scholars who have high citation performance. Us...

Germany has become a major country of immigration, as well as a research powerhouse in Europe. As Germany spends a higher fraction of its GDP on research and development than most countries with advanced economies, there is an expectation that Germany should be able to attract and retain international scholars who have high citation performance. Us...

The increasingly central role of vertical family kinship in Western societies underscores the potential value of intergenerational linkages that tie grandparents to the fertility of their adult children. Recent research has examined the changing demography of grandparenthood and the roles fulfilled by living grandparents, but the complex implicatio...

We evaluate how changes in weather patterns affected rural-urban migration across 41 sub-Saharan African countries, by age and sex, over the 1980–2015 period. We combine recent age- and sex-specific estimates of net rural-urban migration with historical data on rainfall and temperature from the Climate Research Unit (CRU). We also compare standard...

Background: During the 19th and early 20th centuries, large waves of international immigrants, often heterogeneous in terms of age and sex structure, arrived in the United States. Within a relatively short time, many of these immigrants were assimilated. While prior studies have identified an impact of the marriage squeeze on intermarriage, the ro...

BACKGROUND Empirical evidence showing higher survivorship in urban areas of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) supports a theory of rural disadvantage. Yet this evidence mostly builds on infant or child mortality. There is practically no empirical evidence comparing adult mortality levels across urban and rural sectors. OBJECTIVE This study explores adult mo...

This report is concerned with the question of what share of urban population growth is due to natural increase and what share is due to rural to urban migration flows. This question is particularly salient in developing countries, where more of the world’s population growth is occurring and where urbanization trends are the fastest. This study revi...

Evaluating a long–term methodological norm – the use of interviewers who have no prior social relationship to respondents – we compare response patterns across levels of interviewer–respondent familiarity. We differentiate three distinct levels of interviewer–respondent familiarity, based on whether the interviewer is directly acquainted with the r...

We report results of an experiment designed to assess whether the payment of contingent incentives to respondents in Karnataka, India, impacts the quality of survey data. Of 2276 households sampled at the city block level, 934 were randomly assigned to receive a small one-time payment at the time of the survey, whereas the remaining households did...

Public policy programs must often impose limits on who may be eligible for benefits. Despite research on the impact of exclusion in developed countries, there is little evidence on how people react to being excluded from benefits in developing societies. Utilizing repeated waves of data from an experimental evaluation of Mexico's foundational PROGR...

Taking advantage of historical census records that include full first and last names, we apply a new approach to measuring the effect of cultural assimilation on economic success for the children of the last great wave of immigrants to the United States. We created a quantitative index of ethnic distinctiveness of first names and show the consequen...

We offer the first empirical test of the ‘stranger-interviewer norm’, according to which interviewers in social, demographic, and health surveys should be strangers—not personally familiar with respondents. We use data from an experimental survey in the Dominican Republic that featured three types of interviewer: from out of town (outsiders); local...

Sterilization levels reported in the Dominican Republic appear well above what we would normally expect given prevailing patterns in the region. We suspect that the use of strangers as interviewers-the normative approach in data collection in both developed and developing country settings-may be partly responsible for this result, and may underlie...

Simmel’s conception of the stranger as someone objective, reliable, and to whom individuals are willing to disclose their secrets has long influenced the practice of survey research: interviewers are almost always “strangers” to the respondents. This idea, however, has never been experimentally tested and is at odds with a large body of research th...

Theoretical approaches in studies on professionals are implicitly based on an assumption of homogeneity of attitudes among professionals. However, this assumption has never been validated. This paper examines whether professionals worldwide have relatively homogenous attitudes towards work as compared to non-professionals, and compares two competin...

Evaluating the impact of poverty-reduction programs on fertility is complicated given that changes in incentives to have children take time to be incorporated into decision making and evaluation periods are usually quite brief. We explore the use of birth spacing as a short-run indicator of the impact of poverty-reduction programs on fertility. The...

This article examines the dynamics and causes of the shift in the gender composition of migration, and more particularly, in women's access to migration opportunities and decision-making. Our analysis focuses on Albania, a natural laboratory for studying international migration where out-migration was essentially nonexistent from the end of World W...

In this article, using data on traffic volume and fatal accident rates in Israel from 2001 to 2004 — a period spanning much of the Second Intifada — we examine the population-level responses to endemic terror to uncover whether societies become habituated so that the response weakens following repeated attacks or whether they become increasingly se...

While the science of program evaluation has come a tremendous distance in the past couple of decades, measurement error remains a serious concern and its implications are often poorly understood by both data collectors and data analysts. The primary aim here is to offer a type of “back-to-basics” approach to minimizing error in developing country s...

This paper argues that terrorism, beyond its immediate impact on innocent victims, also raises the costs of crime, and therefore, imposes a negative externality on potential criminals. Terrorism raises the costs of crime through two channels: (i) by increasing the presence and activity of the police force, and (ii) causing more people to stay at ho...

Terrorist attacks in the United States and in Western Europe have been rare, and public awareness of the terrorist menace has largely been molded by a few horrific events. In contrast, other countries have experienced chronic terrorism, with attacks on buses, restaurants, coffee shops, and retail establishments. In this review, we assess the impact...

During the economic crises Nicaragua suffered between 2000 and 2002, a conditional cash transfer program targeting poor households began operating. Using panel data on 1,397 households from the program's experimentally designed evaluation, we examined the impact of the program on household structure. Our findings suggest that the program enabled ho...

The plan to increase HIV testing is a cornerstone of the international health strategy against the HIV/AIDS epidemic, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. This paper highlights a problematic aspect of that plan: the reliance on clinic- rather than home-based testing. First, drawing on DHS data from across Africa, we demonstrate the substantial diffe...

This paper argues that terrorism, beyond its immediate impact on innocent victims, also raises the costs of crime, and therefore, imposes a negative externality on potential criminals. Terrorism raises the costs of crime through two channels: (i) by increasing the presence and activity of the police force, and (ii) causing more people to stay at ho...

From September 2000, Israelis have been exposed to frequent terror attacks. In this study, we evaluated the severity of anxiety symptoms among Jerusalem-based mothers during the period of terror (1/2002 to 2/2005). Women (N=595) were recruited from maternity wards in public hospitals throughout the three year interval, and each participant was admi...

This paper examines the causes and dynamics of the shift in the gender composition of migration, and more particularly, in the access of women to migration opportunities and decision making. The context of the analysis is Albania, a natural laboratory for studying migration developments given that out-migration was practically eliminated from the e...

Because conditional cash transfer (CCT) programmes (which make payments to poor households, conditional on their behaviour) potentially affect both household resource levels and parental preferences for quality vs. quantity of children, they may have unintended consequences for fertility. We use panel data from experimental CCT programmes in three...

This paper examines how permanent income and other components of socio-economic status (SES) are related to fertility in less developed countries. Because permanent income cannot be measured directly, we employ a latent-variable method. We compare our results with those of the more common proxy-variable method and investigate the consequences of no...

A dynamic stalled fertility transition is the best way to describe the recent fertility experience of Muslim Palestinians in Israel. It is generally assumed that once fertility levels fall by 10%, transition is well underway. Muslims in Israel experienced rapid fertility decline from TFR levels near 9 in the 1960s to about 4.5 in the early 1980s, b...

A long series of ethnographic and sociological studies on kinship systems and information flows in developing societies has portrayed networks as varying structurally, serving multiple functions, and expressing themselves in different types of interaction. Little of this earlier work has informed empirical research in demography or development-rela...

Conditional cash transfer programs have been shown to be effective development strategies for raising human capital investments in children in many LDCs. In this paper, we use experimental data from cash transfer programs in three Latin America countries to assess the potential, unintended impact of conditional cash transfers programs on childbeari...

El presente documento examina como los componentes de la Situación Socieconómica (SES), en los que se incluyen los ingresos permanentes, están relacionados con la fertilidad en los países en desarrollo. El documento está dividido en: resumen, introducción, variable de medida para el ingreso permanente, datos y resultados Agencia de Estados Unidos p...

Prior research on Mexican migration has shown that social networks and economic incentives play an important role in determining migration outcomes. We use experimental data from PROGRESA, Mexico's primary poverty-reduction program, to evaluate the effects of conditional cash transfers on migration both domestically and to the United States. Our st...

Terror attacks in Israel produce a temporary lull in light accidents followed by a 35% spike in fatal accidents on Israeli roads 3 days after the attack. Our results are based on time-series analysis of Israeli traffic flows, accidents, and terror attacks from January 2001 through June 2002. Whereas prior studies have focused on subjective reports...

This paper uses Côte d'Ivoire and Nigeria survey data on both supply and demand characteristics to examine how structural and demographic factors influence family planning provision and cost. The model, which takes into account the endogenous influence of service provision on average cost, explains provision well but poorly explains what influences...

Prior research on Mexican migration has shown that social networks and economic incentives play an important role in determining migration outcomes. This study utilizes experimental data on PROGRESA, Mexico's primary poverty reduction program, to evaluate the effects of public cash transfers on migration. Our study complements a growing body of lit...

While there has been an important increase in methodological and empirical studies on health inequality, not much has been written on the theoretical foundation of health inequality measurement. We discuss several reasons why the classic welfare approach, which is the foundation of income inequality analysis, fails to provide a satisfactory foundat...

This paper investigates the consequences of using different economic status proxies on the estimated impact of economic status and other determinants of fertility. Using micro survey data from Ghana and Peru, we find that the proxies for income that best predict fertility are a principal components score of the ownership of consumer durable goods a...

Recent developments in mathematical demography offer a new, simple means of producing long-range population projections. The well-known extant such projections, produced by the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, rely on elaborate cohort-component projection methods that require a large numb...

This article explores the role of migrant networks in Mexican rural out-migration focusing on how network composition influences rural-to-rural, rural-to-urban, and rural-to-international migration. Using data from rural Mexico, migration is considered in a multiple-choice context allowing for the possibility that rural Mexicans can migrate within...

The purpose of this article is to explore the patterns of economicsupport between kin in Cte d'Ivoire. The nuclear family has been dismissed as a meaningful unit within the corporate extended kinship structure of West Africa. Furthermore, extended kinship has been seen as an important support for high fertility since the costs of childbearing are s...

■ Abstract The concepts,of socioeconomic,status (SES) and class are pervasive in sociological studies, yet an examination of the sociological and social science lit- erature suggests a lack of consensus,on their conceptual meaning,and measurement. Our review focuses on the use of SES and class in a specific substantive field, studies of child healt...

In this paper, we explore the role of social networks in the migration decision focusing on the distinct influence networks have on domestic and international migration. The analysis focuses particular attention on the composition of migrant networks in order to improve our understanding of how network composition influences the migration decision....

This article focuses on the implications of reduced breastfeeding on subsequent fertility levels of HIV/AIDS-infected mothers with emphasis on the importance of breastfeeding in high-mortality high-fertility populations. Studies indicate that breastfeeding reduces infant susceptibility to many illnesses particularly diarrhea and infectious diseases...

While it has been often suggested, most notably by Caldwell, that high fertility in developing countries is motivated by the positive economic returns that children contribute to their parents, empirical evidence to support the hypothesis is limited. This paper describes a method of measuring the economic returns from the average child over the ent...

Context: The long-standing debate over the relative merits of vertical and integrated organizational structure for the delivery of family planning services has taken on added significance, particularly in poorer regions such as West Africa, given increasing emphasis on reproductive health services as a whole. Methods: Case studies: from Cote d'Ivoi...

The theoretical importance of intergenerational resource flows has been recognized since Caldwell's 1976 article on the direction of wealth flows and fertility decline. Nevertheless, to date, there has been no formal measurement of the direction and magnitude of intergenerational wealth flows for any high-fertility country. The analytical framework...

The increased availability of survey data and improved estimation techniques have furthered our understanding of maternal mortality in developing countries. Both the indirect and direct sisterhood methods of estimation depend on time-of-death information from surveys. This report proposes a method for calculating two rates, one during the pregnancy...

Thesis (Ph. D. in Demography)--University of California, Berkeley, Dec. 1996. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 185-194).