Books & Reports

Leading experts Warren C. Sanderson and Sergei Scherbov provide a new way to measure individual and population ageing. Instead of counting how many years we’ve lived, we should think about the number of years we have left, our “prospective age.”

A multidisciplinary group of prominent scholars investigates the historical relationship between sexually transmitted infections and infertility. Science did not unmask the causal microorganisms until the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their effects on fertility in human history remain mysterious. This is the first volume to address the subject across more than two thousand years of human history.

Jamie Robins and Miguel Hernán at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health have written a book that provides a cohesive presentation of concepts of, and methods for, causal inference. The book is divided in 3 parts of increasing difficulty: causal inference without models, causal inference with models, and causal inference from complex longitudinal data.

The Sociology of Development section of the American Sociological Association has published a policy brief written by members of the Population Europe network: Francesco C. Billari (Bocconi University), Osea Giuntella (University of Pittsburgh), and Luca Stella (Bocconi University and Institute of Labor Economics, IZA). This brief, "Broadband Internet, Fertility and Work from Home", uses data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) to look at the possible impacts of access to high speed Internet on fertility choices in a low fertility setting.

This book presents a rigorous enquiry into life course processes that are thought to influence health, integrating the latest methodologies for the study of pathways that link socio-demographic circumstances to health with an emphasis on the mediating factors that lie on these pathways.

This report by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and Eurasylum Ltd. focuses on three key and diverse migration topics: measuring the extent of migration in the Global South; comparing immigrant students´ integration; and migration and identity management questions in asylum cases.

Societies rely to a varying extent on the unpaid labour of informal carers. If not adequately supported in their role, informal carers can face negative impacts on their health and well-being; intensive informal caregiving can also result in higher demand and costs for health care as a consequence of its negative impact on the physical and mental health of carers, reduced labour market participation and consequently higher risks of poverty and social exclusion.

This report by the OECD provides a synthesis of the main challenges faced by countries as workers live longer, as well as policy recommendationsand a set of international best practices to foster employability, labour demand and incentives to work at an older age.

To what extent does demographic behaviour, like leaving home, marriage, parenthood and divorce, influence inequality? 

This second annual trend report outlines and summarises new policy developments in the area of child and family policy in the 28 EU Member States (EU28), and reports on progress with policies and activities initiated in earlier years. It is drafted as part of the European Platform for Investing in Children (EPIC) project.