本文使用中国居民收入调查数据库2008年农村住户调查（CHIP2008）数据,将最早外出时间在1984年到1992年之间的农民工定义为早期农民工,基于我国城乡劳动力市场的信息不完全,我们分析了他们在城乡劳动力转移中的先驱效应。实证结果表明,早期农民工越多的地区,当地的农民外出的概率也越高,即城乡劳动力转移中存在先驱效应。考虑到信息传播的质量,我们根据早期农民工的平均教育以及当地其他农民的平均教育进行分组回归,发现教育程度较高的地区,先驱效应越强。本文还发现,先驱越多的地区,当地外出的农民工的行业集聚特征越明显。作为稳健性检验,早期农民工定义的调整以及将1978年以前因外生因素外出的农村劳动力作为早期农民工的替代变量的分析都没有改变文章的结果。

Why are contemporary populations still aging? In the classic view, population aging has been driven almost entirely by fertility decline over the demographic transition, while mortality decline has played a minor role. In this view, populations today are still aging because they are still converging toward the new older stable age distribution. But in the past 25 years an elegant mathematical decomposition of changing mean ages has sometimes been interpreted as showing that recent aging is mainly due to declining mortality rather than fertility. Here we question this interpretation and argue that it is necessary to evaluate the indirect effects of mortality change as well as the direct ones. We suggest that the gold standard for this problem is the analytic simulation with explicit counterfactual comparisons. Analytic simulations show that fertility decline is largely responsible for the old age of contemporary populations and has by far the largest role in accounting for continuing aging from 2005–2010.

This paper investigates whether children’s political success contributes to social stratification and health inequality among older adults. Using China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) data, we investigate whether having a cadre (i.e., politically employed) child substantially increases overall cognitive functioning among older adults. We find that the beneficial effect of having a cadre child on cognitive functioning is equivalent to a 1.5-year increase in education, even after controlling for other variables related to general intelligence. This positive effect is more salient among parents of higher-ranking cadre children, and more salient in less-marketized regions. The results of a Sobel test suggest that about one-fifth of the effect can be explained by the channel of increased social interaction.