Effect of Sex Composition of Children on the Gender of Next Birth in the Context of Low Fertility in Rural China

China currently has the world's most skewed national sex ratio at birth.In this paper,we use data from China's 2001 National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Survey and employ hierarchical logistic models to study how macro factors(mainly fertility policy and economic indicators,as represented by per capita GDP of the village units sampled in this research)and micro factors(mainly fertility intention and sex composition of children)affect the gender of the next birth.We find that the effect of fertility policies is intertwined with the sex composition of children already born.For those couples who have had a son(or sons),fertility policy exerts no effect;but for those with only daughters,the effect is significant.Furthermore,fertility intention,independent from fertility policy,has a significant effect on the gender of the next birth.

Labour market performance of young migrant workers with heterogeneous educational trajectories in China

Successful global cities present a spectrum of development strategies but share the benefit of the reciprocal dynamics between tailored education systems and matching labour markets.This paper examines burgeoning cities in China and investigates the effects of the heterogeneous educational trajectories of young migrant workers in urban China on their labour market performance.Drawing on the National Migrant Dynamics Monitoring Survey,this paper finds striking wage variations among the young migrant population.Migrant workers who attended high schools in current receiving cities earned less than their counterparts who received senior-secondary education elsewhere.Students following the academic track were better off than students following the vocational track.To further explore what has prevented the urban labour market from rewarding migrants who studied in a receiving city,where the education system is expected to better cater to the city’s specific industrial needs,we tested and found evidence of the mediating effects of job industry and occupation.In addition to engaging with empirical debates in the field,this paper develops a theoretical framework to model how the qualitative attributes of an education system affect wage variations among migrant workers.

The Hidden Sexual Minorities:Machine Learning Approaches to Estimate the Sexual Minority Orientation Among Beijing College Students

Based on the fourth-wave Beijing College Students Panel Survey(BCSPS),this study aims to provide accurate estimation of the percentage of the potential sexual minorities among the Beijing college students by using machine learning methods.Specifically,we employ random forest(RF),an ensemble learning approach for classification and regression,to predict the sexual orientation of those who were not willing to disclose his/her inherent sexual identity.To overcome the imbalance problem arising from far different numerical proportion of sexual minority and majority members,we adopt the repeated random sub-sampling for training set by partitioning those who expressed heterosexual orientation into different number of splits and further combining each split with those who expressed sexual minority orientation.The prediction from 24-split random forest suggests that youths in Beijing with sexual minority orientation amount to 5.71%,almost two times that of the original estimation 3.03%.The results are robust to alternative learning methods and covariate sets.Besides,it is also suggested that random forest outperforms other learning algorithms,including AdaBoost,Naïve Bayes,support vector machine(SVM),and logistic regression,in dealing with missing data,by showing higher accuracy,F1 score,and area under curve(AUC)value.

揭秘制药行业对英国患者组织的资助

制药企业资助拨款披露的透明度有限,但Piotr Ozieranski及其同事发现,这些资助款项的金额正在增长,并且仅针对特定群体。患者组织1-2越来越多地参与政策制定和科学研究1-3。但由于从制药企业获得资助,使得他们的贡献受到了质疑4-5。除了少数例外6-7,现有的研究强调,与以利润为驱动力的行业有财务联系,可能会将患者组织转变为看似独立的“第三方”8-10,借以推广通常在临床表现、成本或成本效益上有问题的新药11-12。

Literary Destination Familiarity and Inbound Tourism:Evidence from China's Mainland

Destination familiarity is an important non-economic determinant of tourists’destination choice that has not been adequately studied.This study posits a literary dimension to the concept of destination familiarity—that is,the extent to which tourists have gained familiarity with a given destination through literature—and seeks to investigate the impact of this form of familiarity on inbound tourism to China's Mainland.Employing the English fiction dataset of the Google Books corpus,the New York Times annotated corpus,and the Time magazine corpus,we construct two types of destination familiarity based on literary texts:affectionbased destination familiarity and knowledge-based destination familiarity.The results from dynamic panel estimation(1994–2004)demonstrate that the higher the degree of affection-based destination familiarity with a province in the previous year,the larger the number of inbound tourists the following year.Examining the influence of literature and its consumption on tourism activities sheds light on the dynamics of sustainable tourism development in emerging markets.