Separating the Signal From the Noise: Evidence for Deceleration in Old-Age Death Rates
AbstractWidespread population aging has made it critical to understand death rates at old ages. However, studying mortality at old ages is challenging because the data are sparse: numbers of survivors and deaths get smaller and smaller with age. I show how to address this challenge by using principled model selection techniques to empirically evaluate theoretical mortality models. I test nine models of old-age death rates by fitting them to 360 high-quality data sets on cohort mortality after age 80. Models that allow for the possibility of decelerating death rates tend to fit better than models that assume exponentially i...
Source: Demography - November 2, 2018 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
Subjective Well-being and Partnership Dynamics: Are Same-Sex Relationships Different?
AbstractWe analyze Dutch panel data to investigate whether partnership has a causal effect on subjective well-being. As in previous studies, we find that, on average, being in a partnership improves well-being. Well-being gains of marriage are larger than those of cohabitation. The well-being effects of partnership formation and disruption are symmetric. We also find that marriage improves well-being for both younger and older cohorts, whereas cohabitation benefits only the younger cohort. Our main contribution to the literature is on well-being effects of same-sex partnerships. We find that these effects are homogeneous t...
Source: Demography - November 1, 2018 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
Maternal Age and Child Development
AbstractAlthough the consequences of teen births for both mothers and children have been studied for decades, few studies have taken a broader look at the potential payoffs —and drawbacks—of being born to older mothers. A broader examination is important given the growing gap in maternal ages at birth for children born to mothers with low and high socioeconomic status. Drawing data from the Children of the NLSY79, our examination of this topic distinguishes between the value for children of being born to a mother who delayed her first birth and the value of the additional years between her first birth and the birth of ...
Source: Demography - November 1, 2018 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
Intergenerational Transmission of Multipartner Fertility
AbstractUsing data from administrative registers for the period 1970 –2007 in Norway and Sweden, we investigate the intergenerational transmission of multipartner fertility. We find that men and women with half-siblings are more likely to have children with more than one partner. The differences are greater for those with younger versus older half-siblings, consist ent with the additional influence of parental separation that may not arise when one has only older half-siblings. The additional risk for those with both older and younger half-siblings suggests that complexity in childhood family relationships also contribut...
Source: Demography - October 30, 2018 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
“His” and “Hers”: Meeting the Economic Bar to Marriage
AbstractScholars have suggested that low-income parents avoid marriage because they have not met the so-called economic bar to marriage. The economic bar is multidimensional, referring to a bundle of financial achievements that determine whether couples feel ready to wed. Using the Building Strong Families data set of low-income parents (n = 4,444), we operationalized this qualitative concept into a seven-item index and examined whether couples who met the economic bar by achieving the majority of the items were more likely to marry than couples who did not. Meeting the bar was associated with a two-thirds increase in marr...
Source: Demography - October 23, 2018 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
Patrilocal Residence and Female Labor Supply: Evidence From Kyrgyzstan
AbstractMany people live inpatrilocal societies, which prescribe that women move in with their husbands ’ parents, relieve their in-laws from housework, and care for them in old age. This arrangement is likely to have labor market consequences, in particular for women. We study the effect of coresidence on female labor supply in Kyrgyzstan, a strongly patrilocal setting. We account for the endogenei ty of coresidence by exploiting the tradition that youngest sons usually live with their parents. In both OLS and IV estimations, the effect of coresidence on female labor supply is negative and insignificant. This finding is...
Source: Demography - October 22, 2018 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
Acknowledgment of Reviewers
(Source: Demography)
Source: Demography - October 19, 2018 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
From Privilege to Prevalence: Contextual Effects of Women ’s Schooling on African Marital Timing
AbstractIn Africa and elsewhere, educated women tend to marry later than their less-educated peers. Beyond being an attribute of individual women, education is also an aggregate phenomenon: the social meaning of a woman ’s educational attainment depends on the educational attainments of her age-mates. Using data from 30 countries and 246 birth cohorts across sub-Saharan Africa, we investigate the impact of educational context (the percentage of women in a country cohort who ever attended school) on the relationsh ip between a woman’s educational attainment and her marital timing. In contexts where access to education i...
Source: Demography - October 17, 2018 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
Has Income Segregation Really Increased? Bias and Bias Correction in Sample-Based Segregation Estimates
In this study, we first derive formulas describing the approximate sampling bias in two measures of segregation. Next, using Monte Carlo simulations, we show that the bias-corrected estimators eliminate virtually all of the bias in segregation estimates in most cases of practical interest, a lthough the correction fails to eliminate bias in some cases when the population is unevenly distributed among geographic units and the average within-unit samples are very small. We then use the bias-corrected estimators to produce unbiased estimates of the trends in income segregation over the las t four decades in large U.S. metropo...
Source: Demography - October 16, 2018 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
Longevity and Lifespan Variation by Educational Attainment in Spain: 1960 –2015
AbstractFor a long time, studies of socioeconomic gradients in health have limited their attention to between-group comparisons. Yet, ignoring the differences that might exist within groups and focusing on group-specific life expectancy levels and trends alone, one might arrive at overly simplistic conclusions. Using data from the Spanish Encuesta Sociodemogr áfica and recently released mortality files by the Spanish Statistical Office (INE), this is the first study to simultaneously document (1) the gradient in life expectancy by educational attainment groups, and (2) the inequality in age-at-death distributions within a...
Source: Demography - October 15, 2018 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
Saving, Sharing, or Spending? The Wealth Consequences of Raising Children
This study uses 1986 –2012 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 cohort data to investigate the relationship between raising children and net worth among younger Baby Boomer parents. I combine fixed-effects and unconditional quantile regression models to estimate changes in net worth associated with having childr en in different age groups across the wealth distribution. This allows me to test whether standard economic models for savings and consumption over the life course hold for families at different wealth levels. My findings show that the wealth effects of children vary throughout the distribution. Amo ng fami...
Source: Demography - October 8, 2018 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
Interstate Migration and Employer-to-Employer Transitions in the United States: New Evidence From Administrative Records Data
In this study, we examine the relationship between residential migration and employer-to-employer transitions in the United States, using both survey and administrative records data. We first note strong disagreement between the Current Population Survey (CPS) and other migration statistics on the timing and severity of any decline in U.S. interstate migration. Despite these divergent patterns for overall residential migration, we find consistent evidence of a substantial decline in economic migration between 2000 and 2010. We find that composition and the returns to migration have limited ability to explain recent changes...
Source: Demography - October 8, 2018 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
Beyond the Nuclear Family: Trends in Children Living in Shared Households
AbstractUsing data from the 1996 –2008 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation and the 2009–2016 American Community Survey, we examine trends in U.S. children living in shared households (living with adults beyond their nuclear (parent/parent’s partner/sibling) family). We find that although the share of chil dren who lived in a shared household increased over this period, the rise was nearly entirely driven by an increase in three-generation/multigenerational households (coresident grandparent(s), parent(s), and child). In 1996, 5.7 % of children lived in a three-generation household; by 2016, 9.8 %...
Source: Demography - October 8, 2018 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
Promises and Pitfalls of Using Digital Traces for Demographic Research
AbstractThe digital traces that we leave online are increasingly fruitful sources of data for social scientists, including those interested in demographic research. The collection and use of digital data also presents numerous statistical, computational, and ethical challenges, motivating the development of new research approaches to address these burgeoning issues. In this article, we argue that researchers with formal training in demography —those who have a history of developing innovative approaches to using challenging data—are well positioned to contribute to this area of work. We discuss the benefits and challen...
Source: Demography - October 1, 2018 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
