PopDigests

Christine Schnor (Université Catholique de Louvain) and Marika Jalovaara (University of Turku) examined the increase in non-marital childbearing over the period 1970–2009. Their descriptive analysis reveals that the overall increase in non-marital childbearing is mainly due to increases in non-marital childbearing rates among the medium-educated population, contradicting previous evidence on the key role played by lower educated individuals.

How do policy and norms interact and influence labour market participation? To what extent can policies shape the participation of women in the labour market - over and above local social and cultural norms? And are family-friendly policies sufficient to allow women to pursue a full-time career next to their family responsibilities regardless of cultural context? Hannah Zagel (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) and Zachary Van Winkle (University of Oxford) used  data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement (SHARE) to look at women ages 15 to 50 living throughout the 20th century across Europe to answer these questions.

Do family, friends or work colleagues influence each other’s fertility decisions? If so, to what extent does this generate a multiplying effect in societies? In a study published in Demography, Zafer Buyukkececi (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) and colleagues answered these questions with data from the system of social statistical data sets provided by Statistics Netherlands.

Because of the time lag between the act of smoking and dying from smoking, and because males generally take up smoking before females do, male and female smoking epidemiology often follows a typical double wave pattern dubbed the ‘smoking epidemic’. Research from Maarten Wensink (CPop) et al. aimed to answer the questions: How are male and female deaths from this epidemic differentially progressing in high-income regions on a cohort-by-age basis? How have they affected male-female survival differences?

Thijs van den Broek (Erasmus University Rotterdam) and Marco Tosi (Collegio Carlo Alberto) analysed data from the Generations & Gender Programme (GGP) of older parents from eight eastern European countries. By using an instrumental variable approach, the authors show that for women, having multiple children had a causal protective effect against loneliness.

Zsolt Spéder and Lívia Murinkó (Hungarian Demographic Research Institute, HDRI) and Livia Sz. Oláh (Stockholm University Demography Unit, SUDA) used data from the Hungarian Generations and Gender Survey to study whether two policies, a flat-rate cash support and a tax rebate, increased the likelihood of women in Hungary giving birth to a third child.

Does the balance of "nature" and "nurture" depend on whether you grew up in a society with high or low social mobility?In a recent study in PNAS, Per Engzell and Felix Tropf explore the roles of family of origin and genetics on educational attainment. 

To investigate how child and adolescent time use differs across societies, Gracia and colleagues used 2009-2015 time-diary data on children and adolescents aged 10-17 from Finland, Spain and the UK. They find very strong cross-national differences in child and adolescent time use, net of multiple demographic factors. Consequently, they argue that cross-cultural variations are critical to understand cross-country differences in children’s daily activities.

A recent study by Eva Beaujouan and Caroline Berghammer looked at the fertility gap among women in 19 European countries and the United States. Their results indicate that on average, compared to earlier expectations and intentions, women had fewer children and were childless more often. Fertility gaps differed by country & education level, leading to possible structural explanations.