Demographic Research

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…

Background: Governmental financial assistance programs were widely adopted during COVID-19, but their impacts on women’s reproductive behavior remain unknown. Objective: This paper evaluates how a key social policy instrument implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic – emergency aid – impacted the probability of pregnancy among young women. We also examine whether the use of effective contraceptiv…

Background: The choice between permanent settlement and temporary migration has garnered increased attention in international migration studies, yet the decisions of refugees remain underexplored. Objective: Building on the existing literature on return migration among voluntary migrants, this paper investigates the importance of socio-psychological and economic-skills contexts in refugees’ home …

Background: Seasonal fluctuations in mortality are a persistent demographic and public health phenomenon. The ideal mortality (IDE) framework estimates seasonal excess mortality by comparing observed outcomes with a counterfactual based on the lowest-mortality seasonal window. Objective: This study evaluates the validity of the IDE framework when applied to age- and sex-specific mortality in Serb…

Background: Several general decomposition algorithms have been developed to decompose the difference between the values of demographic measures in two populations. However, fewer techniques are available to researchers wishing to understand how different subpopulations are contributing to the difference in the value of a demographic measure between the total population and a reference subpopulati…

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc across countries, causing an unprecedented healthcare crisis and supply chain disruptions. Our paper focuses on how households coped and the role of expanded Indian government food subsidies in mitigating food insecurity. Objective: We use panel data from two rounds of household surveys (2019 and 2021) to examine changes in per capita household expe…

Background: Accurate and harmonized estimates of education-specific fertility rates are crucial for understanding the past and projecting the future human population. Yet fertility estimates derived from demographic surveys that collect detailed fertility histories often do not align with the reliable and widely used United Nations (UN) World Population Prospects. This inconsistency means that th…