At the 70th 'anniversary' of Münzer’s death, ancient history ‘celebrates’ a more than twice long history of debate on population matters in the Roman Republic and early Empire. More than 170 years of discussion have hitherto not led to any conclusive answer on the basic question against...

OBJECTIVE<br> I develop and explain a new method for interpolating detailed fertility schedules from age-group data. The method allows estimation of fertility rates over a fine grid of ages, from either standard or non-standard age groups. Users can calculate detailed schedules directly from the...

Background: Epigenetic inheritance is a potentially important determinant of health in several mammals. For humans, the existing evidence is weak. We investigate whether disease exposure triggers functional epigenetic inheritance among humans by analyzing siblings who were conceived under...

Parental death precipitates a cascade of events leading to more or less detrimental exposures, from the sudden and dramatic interruption of parental care through the cohabitation with step parents and siblings in a recomposed family. This paper compares the effect of early parental loss on the...

How relevant are the available theoretical perspectives on marriage dissolution for understanding modern family forms? By employing a unique set of longitudinal register-based data for the Jewish population in Israel, this study seeks to find out which of the major theoretical perspectives on...

The tendency of women to outlive their own fertility has been explained allometrically, with age at reproductive cessation attributed to ovarian follicle depletion in allometrically appropriate ovaries, and longevity related to brain and body scaling. However, because women's age at reproductive...

Females in all mammalian species care for their offspring, while most mammalian males do not. This failure of paternal investment is generally explained in terms of a trade-off between paternal care and mating competition. While there has been great interest in the optimal pattern of investment...

This paper stands at the confluence of three streams of historical social science analysis: the sociological study of power relations within the family, the regional demography of historical Europe, and the study of spatial patterning of historical family forms in Europe. It is a preliminary...

In Japan due to the rapid population aging and its large financial pressure on pay-as-you-go retirement systems, the economic impact of bequest wealth has been drawing a tremendous amount of attention. Despite that, there are neither official statistics on bequest for the whole population, nor...

Studies that have investigated the role of unemployment in childbearing decisions have often provided conflicting results. We argue that many of the inconsistencies of prior research may be attributed to a neglect of group-specific differences in behavior. In this study, we examine how the...