Demographic Research

Background: The postponement of first childbirth is a well-established trend across many high-income countries. While delayed childbearing often reduces the likelihood of having additional children, some women compensate by shortening the interval before a second birth. However, the capacity to recuperate fertility after a late start varies, particularly according to educational attainment, and t…

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic and related mitigation policies potentially were related to romantic and sexual partnering among straight and queer college students in 2020–2024. Objective: We examine percentages of those hooking up, dating, and forming long-term romantic relationships in college during 2019–2024; the number of intimate events and relationships; partner meeting contexts; and ho…

Background: Previous research shows that ethnic minorities in Britain are disproportionately affected by housing insecurity. However, studies rarely distinguish between migrant generations, making it difficult to assess intergenerational life course disadvantage. Objective: The objective of this study is to examine the long-term residential mobility and housing trends among migrant generations ac…

Background: Economically insecure conditions may be driving young people’s decisions to delay, forgo, or reduce childbearing. Yet establishing a causal link between economic resources and fertility is methodologically fraught. One approach has been to use survey experiments to manipulate hypothetical economic conditions and gauge respondents’ fertility preferences. Objective: Unlike survey experi…

Background: The US labor force and economic dependency ratios are projected to change significantly through 2060, driven by demographic shifts and persistent inequalities across race, ethnicity, and gender. The United States has lower participation rates than other industrialized countries and large participation gaps between population groups. Methods: We use a dynamic microsimulation model, inc…

Background: Much debate exists about how women’s employment interacts with divorce and separation, with conflicting findings and opposing theoretical interpretations. Objective: This study revisits the employment–separation link from a dynamic perspective, examining how employment influences separation risk (independence), whether women increase employment before separation (anticipation), and ho…

Background: Parenting leave policies shape how caregiving and paid work can be reconciled around the time of childbirth. They have important implications for fertility, employment, and gender equality. Still, there are limited quantitative cross-country data capturing long-term policy changes that impact how long parents can temporarily be away from work to care for their children, and how leave …

Background: A stationary population may offer advantages for societal, economic, and ecological sustainability. It requires that the number of births aligns with expected deaths under given mortality patterns. However, reproductive rates such as the TFR are not designed to assess whether the number of births observed is sufficient to replace expected deaths, necessitating direct assessment of bir…

Background: Fertility in Spain has declined and shifted to later ages alongside diversification of family formation, raising questions about how partnership life courses shape completed fertility by late reproductive age. Objective: We aim to assess how key features of partnership trajectories – timing, duration, and sequencing – relate to motherhood and parity by age 41 among women in contempora…

Background: Even though mortality differentials by socioeconomic status and educational attainment level have been widely examined, the research is often limited to developed countries and recent years. This is primarily due to the absence of consistent and good-quality data. Systematic studies with a broad geographical and temporal spectrum that engage with the link between educational attainmen…

Background: Despite the growth of environmental migration studies in recent decades, spatial analyses examining the impact of climate variability on migration within the United States at a finer geographical scale remain limited. Objective: This study aims to investigate the environmental aspects of migration and explore the heterogeneous impacts of the environment on age- and place-specific migr…

Background: Mortality is known to be higher in winter than in summer, with excess winter deaths ranging between 5% and 30% in Europe. A recent study conducted in the USA sought to quantify the excess winter mortality in terms of life expectancy reduction, by calculating the difference between summer and winter life expectancy. Objective: We aimed to calculate Winter Life Expectancy Reduction (WLE…

Background: Families in Europe are increasingly exposed to economic insecurity, which may heighten their risk of material deprivation. Coping strategies – typically involving employment by family members – may help mitigate such risks. However, the ability to adopt such strategies and their effectiveness may depend on the welfare context and the presence of small children, an aspect that remains …

Background: Cause-of-death analysis is an important part of demographic research nowadays, but this has not always been the case. These analyses were introduced to the discipline in the 1980s, which eventually led to the development of the health transition framework. One of the pioneers of this work was France Meslé. Objective: We interviewed France Meslé to better understand the history of caus…

Background: Age-specific population forecasts for small areas or subnational regions are a valuable tool for local governments. However, typical population projection methods based on the cohort-component approach are difficult to apply on a smaller subnational scale. Objective: We introduce Bayesian methods suitable for obtaining reliable age-specific population forecasts for small regions using…

Background: A declining fertility rate and aging population are major challenges for Vietnam. Methods: This study utilizes panel data from the Vietnam Access to Resources Household Survey, conducted from 2008 to 2016, tracking 1,200 households over nine years. A fixed effects model was employed to control for unobserved factors, such as cultural traditions and fertility motivations, thereby addre…

Background: The institutionalization hypothesis suggests that the negative association between parental separation and children’s outcomes diminishes as divorce becomes more socially accepted and widespread. Although the available evidence provides little support for this hypothesis, drawing definitive conclusions remains challenging due to limitations in existing studies. Objective: Using a larg…

Background: Returned children relocate to their original hukou locations after migration, often due to systemic barriers. China’s hukou system, which assigns rural or urban status, imposes institutional hurdles to those with non-local and rural hukou, resulting in educational exclusion and eventual return. Despite their non-negligible presence, these children remain hard to identify in surveys an…

Background: The collapse of state socialism and Hungary’s transition to a market economy after 1989 greatly changed societal structures, including patterns of fertility and education. Objective: This study examines whether changes in the completed cohort fertility rate (CFR) among Hungarian women born between 1920 and 1982 resulted from shifts in educational composition or fertility within educat…

Background: Since World War II, Britain has witnessed significant societal changes, including in relation to fertility. Robust longitudinal and cross-cohort research requires data harmonisation to create comparable fertility measures to understand the predictors and consequences of these changes across generations. Objective: This paper describes newly created datasets on fertility histories that…