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Copyright of Society: Chinese Journal of Sociology / Shehui is the property of Society: Chinese Journal of Sociology and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper studies the relationship between education and early marriage by exploiting the 1986 Compulsory Schooling Laws in China. We find that one additional year of schooling decreases the probability of marriage before age 18 by 1.7% points and increases the age at first marriage by 0.734 years. We examine the role of labour market outcomes, marriage traditions, assortative mating, and peer marriage behaviours. We also find evidence that education decreases fertility outcomes and affects the marriage outcomes of the next generation. This suggests that policies aimed at combating early marriage could start with improving children's educational attainment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Society: Chinese Journal of Sociology / Shehui is the property of Society: Chinese Journal of Sociology and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Objective: This study examines how household wealth accumulation varies by different types of hypogamy on the basis of couples' own and parental education. Background: Educational hypogamy (wives having more education than their husbands) is increasingly relevant in many societies, given the reversal of the gender gap in education. Prior research has studied how marital sorting on couples' own education shapes their individual earnings trajectories. Few have examined the implications of marital sorting on parental education for family‐level economic well‐being. Method: Using data from the 2010–2018 China Family Panel Studies and multilevel growth curve models, this study examined how household wealth trajectories over years of marriage differ by types of hypogamy. Hypogamy in the child generation (wives having more education), hypogamy in the parent generation (wives having more parental education), and hypogamy in both generations (wives having more own and parental education) were compared to hypogamy in neither generation (wives having neither more own nor parental education). Results: Hypogamy in either the child or the parent generation accumulated more total wealth and housing wealth than hypogamy in neither generation. Hypogamy in both generations experienced the fastest gains in total wealth. Conclusion: Hypogamy on the basis of couples' own or parental education is associated with more household wealth and faster wealth accumulation over years of marriage. Implications: This study sheds light on the long‐term implications of hypogamy based on the education of two generations for wealth stratification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We examine the effects of education on the probability of becoming an entrepreneur. • We find education has a positive effect on the probability of being an employer entrepreneur vis-à-vis an employee and of being an employer entrepreneur vis-à-vis a solo entrepreneur. • We examine the mechanisms through which education affects the propensity for entrepreneurship. We utilize the implementation of the 1986 Compulsory Education Law in China as a natural experiment to examine the relationship between educational attainment and migrant entrepreneurship. Using data from the 2017 China Migrants Dynamics Survey, results from our preferred two-stage least square model, which uses instrumental variable and difference-in-differences estimators to correct for endogeneity, suggest that having one additional year of education generates a 3.5 percentage points increase in the probability of being an employer entrepreneur vis-à-vis an employee, and a 4.7 percentage points increase in the probability of being an employer entrepreneur vis-à-vis a solo entrepreneur. Having better education, however, does not affect the propensity to become an entrepreneur in general vis-à-vis an employee or a solo entrepreneur vis-à-vis an employee. These results are robust to various checks including alternative estimation methods and ways of defining entrepreneurship. We also explore the channels through which educational attainment influences whether one chooses to become an employer entrepreneur. Our findings suggest that assortative mating, difficulties experienced in the host location, permanent settlement intention and social capital mediate the relationship between better education and the choice of both becoming an employer entrepreneur vis-à-vis a solo entrepreneur and an employer entrepreneur vis-à-vis an employee, while risk preferences are a mechanism through which education affects the probability of becoming an employer entrepreneur as opposed to a solo entrepreneur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine how rural-to-urban migration influences marriage timing and assortative mating by family origins using data from the 2012 Chinese Family Panel Studies and in-depth interviews conducted in Beijing. To account for potential selection bias, we compare marriage timing across migration status by holding all other variables at group-specific averages based on event history analysis and propensity-score matching analysis. Results from both approaches show that compared with rural locals, rural migrants marry later, and the negative effects are more pronounced for men, which may be attributed to the greater burden placed on grooms and their families for establishing a household in China. The migration effects are moderated by education and family backgrounds. The in-depth interviews illuminate the mechanisms through pressure and aspiration for career and consumption, uncertainties in life, the timing of education completion, and more liberal attitudes toward marriage in the receiving communities. For assortative mating, we show that rural migrants who are better endowed in human, social, and cultural capital are more likely to marry across birth place, hukou, or migration status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mothers earn less than comparable childless women, and such motherhood penalty differs in magnitude by women's socioeconomic and demographic characteristics. Prior research, however, has rarely considered how the effect of parenthood on women's income may also depend on the characteristics of their partners. Using data from the China Family Panel Studies 2010–2018, we examine how the effects of motherhood on women's earnings and within-couple income inequality vary by couples' educational pairings in China. A large educational gap between spouses–hypergamy or hypogamy–exacerbates the motherhood penalty on a woman's individual income and her share of the couple's combined income. However, when the educational gap between spouses is moderate, hypergamy lessens the motherhood penalty on women's individual income, whereas hypogamy mitigates the penalty on their share of couples' combined earnings. In the context of China's declining fertility, narrowing gender gap in education, and widening gender pay gap, these findings provide descriptive empirical evidence on how the motherhood penalty varies by educational assortative mating and underscore the significance of considering couple dynamics in understanding the motherhood penalty. • The motherhood penalty varies by couples' educational pairings in China. • Two-level heterogamy–hypergamy or hypogamy–exacerbates the motherhood penalty. • One-level hypergamy lessens the motherhood penalty on women's individual income. • One-level hypogamy mitigates the motherhood penalty on women's share of income. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prevailing research on assortative mating marginalizes the agency of third parties. Yet, in China, an intergenerational perspective may be useful because family members have participated in spouse selection to maintain homogamy. Using Fudan Yangtze River Delta Social Transformation Survey, we found 20 percent of young adults found their spouse through family introduction. Education reduces, while family resources increase, young people's reliance on family. For women but not men, reliance on family increased homogamy and somewhat reduced female hypogamy, particularly on ascribed characteristics. These findings suggest that family roles should be carefully analyzed to capture the search context in which marriages are created. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Operational indices optimization is crucial for the global optimization in beneficiation processes. This paper presents a multitasking multiobjective evolutionary method to solve operational indices optimization, which involves a formulated multiobjective multifactorial operational indices optimization (MO-MFO) problem and the proposed multiobjective MFO algorithm for solving the established MO-MFO problem. The MO-MFO problem includes multiple level of accurate models of operational indices optimization, which are generated on the basis of a data set collected from production. Among the formulated models, the most accurate one is considered to be the original functions of the solved problem, while the remained models are the helper tasks to accelerate the optimization of the most accurate model. For the MFO algorithm, the assistant models are alternatively in multitasking environment with the accurate model to transfer their knowledge to the accurate model during optimization in order to enhance the convergence of the accurate model. Meanwhile, the recently proposed two-stage assortative mating strategy for a multiobjective MFO algorithm is applied to transfer knowledge among multitasking tasks. The proposed multitasking framework for operational indices optimization has conducted on 10 different production conditions of beneficiation. Simulation results demonstrate its effectiveness in addressing the operational indices optimization of beneficiation problem. Note to Practitioners—Operational indices optimization is a typical approach to achieve global production optimization by efficiently coordinating all the indices to improve the production indices. In this paper, a multiobjective multitasking framework is developed to address the operational indices optimization, which includes a multitasking multiobjective operational indices optimization problem formulation and a multitasking multiobjective evolutionary optimization to solve the above-formulated optimization problem. The proposed approach can achieve a solution set for the decision-making. The simulation results on a real beneficiation process in China with 10 operational conditions show that the proposed approach is able to obtain a superior solution set, which is associated with a higher grade and yield of the product. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assortative mating is a reproductive strategy used by a diversity of animals, in which individuals choose a mate that shares similar characteristics. This mating strategy has the potential to promote the evolution of various sexual signals and has been a proposed mechanism driving and maintaining color variation in the anuran family Dendrobatidae. Most studies have examined this reproductive strategy in the polytypic poison frog, Oophaga pumilio, in the Bocas del Toro archipelago in Panama. Little attention, however, has been given to ancestral populations across this species' mainland range, where dramatic color polytypism appears to lack. Additionally, most studies are exclusively experimental and investigate mate choice between allopatric populations, neglecting the behaviors of naturally occurring mates. This study observed natural mating pairs within a population of O. pumilio on mainland Costa Rica and tested the prediction that color phenotype of mating females and males would be correlated. Naturally occurring pairs were found to share similar coloration, suggesting that color assortative mating operates in nature, and in a mainland population. Our results indicate that coloration is an important trait in driving the natural mate choices of female O. pumilio, which provides valuable insight into realistic mate selection tactics of this dendrobatid frog. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's HIV prevalence is low, mainly concentrated among female sex workers (FSWs), their clients, men who have sex with men, and the stable partners of members of these high-risk groups. We evaluate the contribution to the spread of HIV of China's regime of heterosexual relations, of the structure of heterosexual networks, and of the attributes of key population groups with simulations driven by data from a cross-sectional survey of egocentric sexual networks of the general population of Shanghai and from a concurrent respondent-driven sample of FSWs. We find that the heterosexual network generated by our empirically calibrated simulations has low levels of partner change, strong constraints on partner selection by age and education, and a very small connected core, mainly comprising FSWs and their clients and characterized by a fragile transmission structure. This network has a small HIV epidemic potential but is compatible with the transmission of bacterial sexually transmitted infections (STIs), such as syphilis, which are less susceptible to structural breaks in transmission of infection. Our results suggest that policies that force commercial sex underground could have an adverse effect on the spread of HIV and other STIs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the causal impact of women's education on fertility by exploiting the cross-regional and cross-time variations in the enforcement of compulsory schooling reform in China. Using data from the 2010 Chinese Census, we find that increased women's education permanently reduces fertility, which is different from the evidence in many countries where women compensate at later ages for the initial loss in births. We also find that increased education has a greater negative effect on the total live births of rural hukou women. When examining the potential channels underlying the relationship, we find that increased women's education reduces child mortality, delays women entering the marriage market and childbirth, increases the opportunity costs of childrearing, and promotes positive assortative mating. Our research provides an additional explanation for the rapid decline in the total fertility rate in China. • Exploiting the cross-regional and cross-time variations in the enforcement of compulsory schooling reform in China, we examine the causal effect of women's education on fertility. • Our IV estimates show that an additional year of female education significantly reduces the number of births by 0.24. • The negative impact of women's education on fertility operates by reducing the number of children per woman rather than increasing the incidence of childlessness. • We examine the potential channels underlying the relationship, and find that increased women's education can affect fertility through several channels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic reforms and trade liberalization have brought profound changes to the Chinese labor market. In this paper, we apply the technique of decomposing the coefficient of variation to examine the impact of changes in married women's employment and earnings on income inequality among Chinese urban households. Using the Chinese Household Income Surveys from 1988, 1995, and 2002, we explore the differences between two phases of economic transition: the gradualist reform period (1988-1995) and the radical reform period (1995-2002). Our analysis shows that the public-sector labor retrenchment of the late 1990s has led to a drastic decline in the employment rates of women, especially those married to low-earning husbands, and the change in women's employment was a major force driving income inequality in post-restructuring urban China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the study regarding the cross-border marriages between Hong Kong and Mainland China due to their increasing economic integration and social interactions. It also examines the result of the comparisons among three types of marriages, such as the Hong Kong grooms and Hong Kong brides, Hong Kong grooms and Mainland brides, and Hong Kong grooms married to someone from a third country, through the use data analysis, descriptive analysis, and multivariate analysis. It also discusses the combination of the assortative mating and societal disparity as the theoretical perspective of the study. Charts and tables are also presented.

This paper examines the consequences of political, economic and social change in mid-twentieth century China for patterns of assortative mating by both education and class. Traditionally in China, marriages were arranged by parents, and ideally matched families of similar socioeconomic status. However, the Marriage Law passed by the People's Republic of China in 1950 promoted free choice and forbade arranged marriage and other interference by families in the marriage decisions of their children. Later, Land Reform, Collectivization and other movements had profound impacts on rural household organization and social relations. We investigate their effects on assortative mating by using novel linked administrative data compiled in rural Shanxi Province in North China in the mid-1960s. These data record the education and family class labels (jiating chushen) of spouses for 1459 couples in 30 villages. The class labels were assigned in the 1950s based on family landholding before the Land Reform and became hereditary. We find that class label had effects above and beyond those of education, suggesting that assortative mating studies that only consider education overlook an important dimension of social status in marriage patterns, and thereby overstate the overall permeability of boundaries between social groups. Furthermore, by comparing couples according to whether they married before or after 1949, we find that patterns of homogamy and hypergamy remained highly stable in the face of substantial social transformation after 1949. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies have shown that marriage is related with people's health. Based on data from the Volume A of China Migrants Dynamic Survey (CMDS_A) in 2017 (N = 127,829), this study attempted to document the degree of educational assortative mating in Chinese internal migrants, as well as how it evolves over time, and further analyze the relationship between educational assortative mating and people's self-rated health (SRH). The results indicated that the proportion of educational homogamy kept increasing and gradient marriage kept decreasing over time both in male and female. "Educational homogamy" (58.8%) and "male more educated" (27.2%) were still the main marital education matching patterns in first-married couples of Chinese internal migrants. Educational homogamy was beneficial to promote people's SRH and educational hypogamy would impair their SRH, and the negative effects of educational hypogamy on SRH was stronger in female than in male. The gender equality of educational opportunities increases the degree of educational assortative mating in Chinese internal migrants. Educational attainment is playing a more and more important role in "love" marriages. "Likes attract likes" is not just about love, but also an important part of health.

Objective: GJB2 mutation is recognized as the prevalent causes of non-syndromic hearing loss (NSHL) worldwide. However, the mutation profiles of GJB2 are rarely reported in deafness probands of the assortative mating family. Therefore, this study aimed to characterize the frequencies of GJB2 mutations in probands with hearing loss in the assortative mating family in Hubei province, Central China., Methods: Genomic DNA was extracted from blood samples of 29 probands with hearing loss. The target fragments were amplified by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and subjected to sequencing to identify sequence variations., Results: None of 29 probands harbored homozygous mutation in GJB2, while GJB2 heterozygous mutations c.134G>A, c.139G>T, and a deletion c.235delC were identified in three probands, respectively., Conclusion: GJB2 mutations are rare in Chinese probands of assortative mating families. Screening for responsible genes other than GJB2 is necessary for NSHL in these probands., (Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.)