News from the Network

The European Research Council (ERC) has announced today (14 April 2016) the awarding of its prestigious Advanced Grants to 277 senior researchers, worth in total € 647 million. Among the grantees are two senior Population Europe researchers: Professor Francesco Billari (University of Oxford) and Professor Arnstein Aassve (Bocconi University).

In 2016, thousands of couples across Europe will decide to move in together—without getting married first. It makes sense. Sharing expenses cuts costs in an economy characterized by slug­gish wage growth, and living together simply saves time. Plus, cohabitation connotes a certain level of commit­ment without the legal—and social—obligations that come with marriage. You might call it a baby step. Whatever the case, they won’t be alone. By 2010, nearly 40% of French couples between the ages 25 and 44 had chosen the cohabitation route, registered or un­registered.

As negotiations over Scotland’s fiscal future in the UK progressed earlier this year, one obstacle loomed ever larger: Scotland’s long-term low rate of pop­ulation growth and falling support ratio, the number of people contributing to versus drawing from contribution-based social policies. Negotiators are right to fret. Falling support ratios make policies like pensions costlier for society and the economy.

A growing body of evidence suggests that reproductive history influences post-reproductive mortality. A potential explanation for this association is confounding by socioeconomic status in the family of origin, as socioeconomic status is related to both fertility behaviours and to long-term health. Kieron Barclay, Katherine Keenan, Emily Grundy, Martin Kolk and Mikko Myrskylä examine the relationship between age at first birth, completed parity, and post-reproductive mortality and address the potential confounding role of family of origin.

The draft of the scientific programme for the 2016 European Population Conference in Mainz is now available online. You can find more information here: https://epc2016.princeton.edu/topics.

By examining social attitudes on same-sex adoption in 28 European countries, researchers Judit Takács, Ivett Szalma and Tamás Bartus highlighted individual and country-level factors that can determine the level of social acceptance or rejection of this specific kind of adoption. Their article contributes to the literature on social acceptance of lesbian women, gay men, and their adoption practices in Europe and directs attention to several previously under-researched aspects of social attitudes on same-sex parenting rights.

Population ageing in Western countries has made delayed retirement and extended working life a policy priority in recent years. Retirement timing has been linked to individual factors such as health and wealth, but less is known about the role of the psychosocial work environment. A paper by researcher Ewan Carr and his colleagues drew upon longitudinal data on 3462 workers aged 50–69 from five waves of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA). Regression models were used to assess the association of working conditions with preferred timing of retirement and actual work exit.

Out now: the Study & Career Newsletter of Population Europe, the network of Europe’s leading demographic research centres.

A new study by researcher Martin Kolk makes a contribution to the demography and geography of kinship by studying how internal migration and demography shape the geographical availability of kin in contemporary Sweden.