Background Cape Verde has produced migrants over the centuries. Its history and geography have compelled males and females to leave their homeland in search of resources to invest in their family s survival and development. Literature on parental investment has evidenced the association between investment in embodied capital during infancy and early childhood and its outcomes at later stages. However, these studies seldom address migrant population. Aim This study aims to gain a better understanding of the relationship in a migratory context between parental investment in infancy and its outcomes in prepuberty embodied capital, among Cape Verdean children living in Cova da Moura, a deprived neighbourhood in Lisbon Metropolitan Area, Portugal. Methods A mixed method s approach combining quantitative with qualitative studies - is used. The prepubertal capital of the 221 schoolchildren attending the basic school located in Cova da Moura is assessed through Anthropometry and educational records analysis. The parental investment in infancy of 75 is analysed through interviews with parents and combined documentation (e.g. health booklets, reports, legislation). Results The key findings are: 1)Children are born and raised between 1997 and 2002, a time characterized by a favourable socioeconomic development in Portugal in general and Cova da Moura in particular. 2)In spite of living in a so called deprived neighbourhood , the school children linear growth falls into the healthy range of the III NHANES growth reference, and it is slightly better than the linear growth of other groups of children measured in Portugal in late 1980s and early 2000. School-oriented cognitive development is not adequate, however. A third of the students have not a regular school performance. 3)Parental investment in infancy is significantly associated to prepubertal physical growth and school-oriented cognitive development. The size effect is, however, small.

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Survivorship of children is unsurprisingly dependent upon numerous variables, not least of which is the role that preferential treatment plays in biasing the birth and survival of sons and daughters across cultures. This study draws upon an evolutionary approach by examining the "Trivers-Willard hypothesis" concerning condition-dependent sex allocation and differential parental investment. The central idea is that within a polygynous social mating structure - where reproductive variance is higher for males than for females as an intrinsic function of polygyny - mothers in optimal condition (defined by high status, good health, and abundant resources) are more likely to produce and invest in male offspring whereas mothers in poor condition (defined by low status, poor health, and resource deprivation) are more likely to produce and invest in female offspring so as to maximize potential lifetime reproductive success. Previous research on humans concerning this hypothesis tends to be restricted to one cultural group and thereby limited in sample size. For this study, nationally representative household survey data collected by the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS+) program across 35 countries was used to test biological, resource-oriented, and behavioral aspects affecting maternal condition, sex allocation, and parental investment in humans. Country samples ranged from 732 to 21,839 women interviewed within South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean/Latin America, and the Near East/North Africa. The units of analysis were the mothers and their lastborn child (N = 128,039 woman-child pairs). A sequence of hierarchical regressions theoretically pre-specified a causal model concerning four constructed scales measuring maternal socioeconomic resources, maternal biological condition, prenatal care for the lastborn child, and health-seeking for the lastborn child. In startling contrast to the predictions of the original hypothesis, analysis of the overall model revealed small, yet stable, cross-regional main effects suggesting that - for all four regions – maternal biology predicts lastborn daughters while maternal resources predict lastborn daughters for each region, with the exception of Sub-Saharan Africa. Moreover, protective/preventative health-related behaviors predict lastborn sons within South Asia and the Near East/North Africa, while prenatal care and health-seeking are differentially attributed to the prediction of sons and daughters within Sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean/Latin America.

Chapter 1: Relative Concerns and the Choice of Fertility Empirical research has shown that people exhibit relative concerns, they value social status. If they value their children's status as well, what effect will that have on their decisions as parents? This paper argues that parents and potential parents are in competition for status and rank in the generation of their children; as a consequence richer agents may cut back on the number of children they have and invest more in each child to prevent children of lower income agents from mimicking their own children. This effect need not be uniform so that equilibrium fertility may e.g. be a U-shaped function of income, even when agents would privately like to increase fertility when they receive greater income. These findings have wide ramifications: they may contribute to our understanding of the working of the demographic transition; they also suggest that the low fertility traps seen in some developed countries are rather strongly entrenched phenomena; and they o er a new explanation for voluntary childlessness. Chapter 2: Relative Concerns and Primogeniture While pervasive in the past, differential treatment of children, i.e. different levels of attention and parental investments into children of the same parent, has become rare in modern societies. This paper offers an explanation based on technological change which has rendered the success of a child more uncertain for a parent who is deciding on how much to invest into each of his children. Within a framework of concerns for social status (or relative concerns), agents decide on how many children to have and how much to invest in each child. When their altruism towards each child is decreasing in the total number of children, it is shown that they may solve the trade-off between low investment, high marginal return children (that come in large numbers and hence hurt parental altruism) and high investment, low marginal return children (that come in low numbers) by demanding both types and hence practice differential treatment. Uncertainty over status or rank outcomes of children reduces the range of equilibrium investment levels intro children so that the difference in the numbers they come in is reduced. Eventually the concern for return dominates and differential treatment disappears. Chapter 3: Co-Evolution of Institutions and Preferences: the case of the (human) mating market This paper explores the institutions that may emerge in response to mating preferences being constrained in their complexity in that they can only be conditioned on gender not other characteristics of the carrier of the preferences. When the cognitive capacity of the species allows a sophisticated institutional setup of one gender proposing and the other accepting or rejecting to be adopted, this setup is shown to be able to structure the mating allocation process such that preferences evolve to forms that, conditional on the setup, are optimal despite the constraint on complexity. Nature can be thought of as delegating information processing to the institutional setup. In an application to humans it is shown that the mechanism of the model can help explain why men and women may exhibit opposed preferences in traits such as looks and cleverness. The anecdotal fact that women do not marry down while men do can be interpreted as a maladaptation of female preferences to modern marriage markets.

This thesis studies the dynamics of parents’ time with children. It uses self-reported time diary data to empirically document discrepancies between high- and low-educated parents’ time spent in various childcare activities. By doing so, the study considers one important but under-researched form of childhood inequality, namely inequality in parental time investment. The thesis is among the first to provide an extensive and detailed empirical documentation of variations in parents’ time use with children and to examine the effect of macro-structure and policy context on parenting behaviour. Using the American Time Use Survey (2003-2008), the thesis first investigates variations in parents’ time spent in different types of childcare among white parents in the US. Then, the American Heritage Time Use Survey (1965-2010) is employed to examine whether differences between high-and low-educated parents’ time spent with children have been growing or diminishing over time. Finally, the Multinational Time Use Survey (1965-2008) is used to explore the relationship between specific policies, macro-economic structure and childcare across time and across countries. The results can be summarized as follows. High-educated parents provide more primary childcare for their children compared to low-educated parents. The difference is particularly acute during the early years of childhood, and the gap is particularly wide for childcare activities which are fundamentally important for the social and cognitive development of children. This parental investment gap, most notably between high-and low-educated mothers, has been widening in the US. The main source of this widening phenomenon is the steady increase in high-educated mothers’ time spent in interactive and developmental childcare activities, rather than in routine and physical childcare activities. The analysis of cross-national data shows that the strong positive effect of education on childcare is a cross-national occurrence. However, the strength of this association varies considerably across time and across countries: universal paid leave for mothers and a gender egalitarian labour market structure help alleviate the education and gender gap in childcare. Mothers provide more primary childcare as the number of available paid leave weeks increases, while fathers increase their contribution to primary childcare as the percentage of women in the labour market increases. The provision of paid leave for mothers decreases the effect of education on primary childcare, and specific family policies as well as gender egalitarian socio-economic contexts can help alleviate inequalities in parental time investment in children.

<p>This thesis integrates the fields of sexual selection, parental investment and sex role theory by investigating mutual mate choice and mate competition in the sex role reversed deep snouted pipefish <i>Syngnathus typhle</i> (Pisces: Syngnathidae) through a series of laboratory experiments. In<i> S. typhle</i>, the female transfers her eggs to the male's brood pouch where they are nourished and oxygenated for about a month, when the male gives birth to the independent fry.</p><p>Mate choice was found to be adaptive. Both sexes benefited from mating with preferred partners in terms of increased offspring viability and got larger, or faster growing, offspring when mating with large fish. Females were also shown to prefer males with thicker brood pouches. Thus, females, the more competitive sex, had multiple preferences. Both male and female choice behaviour was found to be flexible and influenced by available information on partner quality. In addition, males, but not females, copied the mate choice of consexuals. </p><p>Both sexes were found to take their own quality in relation to surrounding competitors into account when deciding whether to display to potential partners. Male-male competition was found to influence both the mate choice of males and, potentially, overrule the mate choice of females. Males did not compete as intensely as females, nor did they use their sexual ornament in this context as females do. Rather, the ornament was used in interactions with females, and males that displayed more received more eggs.</p><p>The findings in this thesis emphasise the importance of not viewing mate choice and competition as opposite behaviours, but rather to apply a dynamic approach in mate choice studies, integrating choice and competition in both sex</p>

This thesis integrates the fields of sexual selection, parental investment and sex role theory by investigating mutual mate choice and mate competition in the sex role reversed deep snouted pipefish Syngnathus typhle (Pisces: Syngnathidae) through a series of laboratory experiments. In S. typhle, the female transfers her eggs to the male's brood pouch where they are nourished and oxygenated for about a month, when the male gives birth to the independent fry. Mate choice was found to be adaptive. Both sexes benefited from mating with preferred partners in terms of increased offspring viability and got larger, or faster growing, offspring when mating with large fish. Females were also shown to prefer males with thicker brood pouches. Thus, females, the more competitive sex, had multiple preferences. Both male and female choice behaviour was found to be flexible and influenced by available information on partner quality. In addition, males, but not females, copied the mate choice of consexuals. Both sexes were found to take their own quality in relation to surrounding competitors into account when deciding whether to display to potential partners. Male-male competition was found to influence both the mate choice of males and, potentially, overrule the mate choice of females. Males did not compete as intensely as females, nor did they use their sexual ornament in this context as females do. Rather, the ornament was used in interactions with females, and males that displayed more received more eggs. The findings in this thesis emphasise the importance of not viewing mate choice and competition as opposite behaviours, but rather to apply a dynamic approach in mate choice studies, integrating choice and competition in both sex

In this thesis, I investigate economic and policy implications of individual choice decisions, including consumers’ choices among differentiated products and households’ decisions on intra-household resource allocations. In the first chapter, I develop a consumer demand model for US retail banking services in which consumers have preference over the geographical convenience of their banks’ networks. The purpose of the study is to identify consumers’ taste for branch network convenience in the US banking industry and to assess the effect of this demand motive on bank revenues, consumer surplus, and market structure. I show that consumers value the geographical convenience of their bank branch network to a large extent. Specifically, a branch that is one mile closer is equivalent to a branch with a 0.4 percent higher annual interest rate. Furthermore, consumers value proximity of the branch network to both their residence and workplace. The counterfactual experiment shows that banks with a larger number of branches enjoy greater network benefits in terms of revenue. Meanwhile, consumers benefit from the reduction in their expected travel distance by choosing depository institutions with large-scale networks. The second chapter examines how parents adjust bride-prices and land divisions to compensate their sons for differences in their schooling expenditures in rural China. The model is tested using data from a unique household interview survey carried out in Hebei Province. The main estimate implies that when a son receives one yuan less in schooling investment than his brother, he will obtain 0.7 yuan more in observable marital and post-marital transfers as partial compensation. This marginal compensation estimate is quantitatively larger than any comparable estimate using North American data, suggesting that the unitary model is a useful model of resource allocation for sons in traditional agricultural families. As a supplement to Chapter 2, Chapter 3 investigates matchmakers’ negotiation role in rural Chinese marriages and its impact on marital transfer from the parents to the children at the time of marriage. Using a unique household-level dataset collected in Hebei province, I find that a negotiator’s involvement can raise the total marital transfer by 20 percent, which supports my public goods story.

In this thesis, I investigate economic and policy implications of individual choice decisions, including consumers’ choices among differentiated products and households’ decisions on intra-household resource allocations. In the first chapter, I develop a consumer demand model for US retail banking services in which consumers have preference over the geographical convenience of their banks’ networks. The purpose of the study is to identify consumers’ taste for branch network convenience in the US banking industry and to assess the effect of this demand motive on bank revenues, consumer surplus, and market structure. I show that consumers value the geographical convenience of their bank branch network to a large extent. Specifically, a branch that is one mile closer is equivalent to a branch with a 0.4 percent higher annual interest rate. Furthermore, consumers value proximity of the branch network to both their residence and workplace. The counterfactual experiment shows that banks with a larger number of branches enjoy greater network benefits in terms of revenue. Meanwhile, consumers benefit from the reduction in their expected travel distance by choosing depository institutions with large-scale networks. The second chapter examines how parents adjust bride-prices and land divisions to compensate their sons for differences in their schooling expenditures in rural China. The model is tested using data from a unique household interview survey carried out in Hebei Province. The main estimate implies that when a son receives one yuan less in schooling investment than his brother, he will obtain 0.7 yuan more in observable marital and post-marital transfers as partial compensation. This marginal compensation estimate is quantitatively larger than any comparable estimate using North American data, suggesting that the unitary model is a useful model of resource allocation for sons in traditional agricultural families. As a supplement to Chapter 2, Chapter 3 investigates matchmakers’ negotiation role in rural Chinese marriages and its impact on marital transfer from the parents to the children at the time of marriage. Using a unique household-level dataset collected in Hebei province, I find that a negotiator’s involvement can raise the total marital transfer by 20 percent, which supports my public goods story.