In developing countries, rainfall shocks around the time of birth have been shown decrease later health. The mechanism is unknown, but could run through income shocks, disease exposure, or increasing opportunity cost of parental time which influences parenting behavior. We use the Vietnam...

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...

The Gompertz distribution is widely used to describe the distribution of adult deaths. Previous works concentrated on formulating approximate relationships to characterize it. However, using the generalized integro-exponential function Milgram (1985) exact formulas can be derived for its...

This special collection of Demographic Research is devoted to the issue of how economic and employment uncertainties relate to fertility and family dynamics in Europe. The collection is based on contributions to a workshop held in Berlin in July 2009, which in turn was stimulated by the onset of...

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,...

A number of indices have been used in recent years to calculate lifespan variation, each with different underlying properties. Although these indices are assumed to be interchangeable, little research has been conducted to show under which conditions this assumption is appropriate, or how to...

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The notion of ‘patriarchy’ has pervaded the scholarly descriptions of peasant families in historical Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. The term has often included many different elements, such as the dominance of patrilineal descent, patrilocal or patrivirilocal residence after marriage,...

Investigating the effect of mortality shocks on humans is difficult in the absence of laboratory experiments. However, some events in human history serve as natural experiments. Using data for Australian prisoners during WWII and for the Ukrainian Famine in 1933, I analyzed the effect of sudden...