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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Can Maternity Benefits Have Long-Term Effects On Childbearing? Evidence From Soviet Russia, Olga Malkova
Can Maternity Benefits Have Long-Term Effects On Childbearing? Evidence From Soviet Russia, Olga Malkova
Economics Faculty Publications
This paper quantifies the effects of Russia’s 1981 expansion in maternity benefits on completed childbearing. The program provided one year of partially paid parental leave and a small cash transfer upon a child’s birth. I exploit the program’s two-stage implementation and find evidence that women had more children as a result of the program. Fertility rates rose immediately by 8.2% over twelve months. The increase in fertility rates not only persisted for the ten-year duration of the program, but it reflected large increases in higher-order births to older women who already had children before the program started.
How To Build A Domesticated Fox: The Start Of A Long Journey, Lee A. Dugatkin
How To Build A Domesticated Fox: The Start Of A Long Journey, Lee A. Dugatkin
The Chautauqua Journal
In 1959, outside of Novosibirsk, Siberia, Dmitri Belyaev and Lyudmila Trut began what remains one of the longest-running experiments in biology. For the last 59 years they have been domesticating silver foxes and studying evolution in real time. Belyaev died in 1985, but Trut has continued to lead this experiment up to this very day. Each generation they and their team have been selecting the calmest, most prosocial-toward-humans foxes and preferentially breeding those individuals. Today they have foxes that are calmer than lap dogs, and who also look eerily dog-like—floppy ears, wagging tail and all. Belyaev and Trut’s results have …