Mortality decline has historically been a result of reductions in the level of mortality at all ages. The slope of mortality increase with age has been remarkably stable. A number of leading researchers on aging, however, suggest that the next revolution of longevity increase will be the result...

Historical Germany represents a perfect laboratory for studying interregional demographic differences, yet the historical family structures in this part of the European continent remain largely unexplored. This study seeks to fill this gap by documenting the variability of living arrangements...

Some 20 years after unification, the contrast between East and West Germany provides a unique natural experiment for studying the persistence of communist-era family patterns, the effects of economic change, and the complexities of the process of fertility postponement. After unification,...

Over the last decades numerous studies have dealt with demographic differences between the former communist eastern part of Germany and western Germany. Although the demography of these two regions has converged with respect to mortality and overall fertility levels, non-marital births are the...

There are already several documented examples of recent increases in cohort fertility in Scandinavia, but for most countries, cohorts are too young to see if cohort fertility has increased. We produce new estimates of completed cohort fertility for cohorts born in the 1970s. We combine the best...

The 1970s worries of the "population bomb" were replaced in the 1990s with concerns of population aging driven by falling birth rates. Across the developed world, the nearly universally-used fertility indicator, the period total fertility rate, fell well below two children per woman. However,...

Period fertility rates fell to previously unseen low levels in a large number of countries beginning in the early 1990s. The persistence of Total Fertility Rates under 1.3 raised the possibility of dramatic, rapid population aging as well as population decline. In an analysis of recent trends,...

We study prediction and error propagation in Hernes, Gompertz, and logistic models for innovation diffusion. We develop a unifying framework in which the models are linearized with respect to cohort age and predictions are derived from the underlying linear process. We develop and compare...

In this paper, we re-introduce geography into the analysis of fertility decline in the first demographic transition in Europe. We reanalyze Galloway et al.'s (1994) Prussian data, fitting structural models similar to those of Galloway et al. to the data and to map the residuals. Our findings...

We introduce a new class of models in which demographic behavior such as fertility is postponed by differing amounts depending only on cohort membership. We show how this model fits into a general framework of period and cohort postponement that includes the existing models in the literature,...