Demography最新文献

Studies have shown strong relationships between the presence of kin and children's survival outcomes in historical and contemporary low-income contexts. However, this relationship has never been studied among an enslaved population, who encountered extremely harsh living conditions. Examining this relationship among different populations may reveal similarities and differences across contexts. The present study addresses this gap by examining the life courses of children born between 1830 and 1863 and enslaved in Suriname (n = 19,095 children) and their mothers. For the period 1848‒1863, we can also observe matrilineal kin, including grandmothers, aunts, and uncles (n = 12,020 children). The relationships of matrilineal kin's presence and children's hazard of death from ages 6 months to 12 years were analyzed with Cox proportional hazards models. Experiencing maternal death was related to an increased hazard of death for children throughout childhood, but particularly during infancy (ages 6 months to 1 year; hazard ratio: 6.24, 95% confidence interval: 3.34‒11.66), and it decreased as children aged. The presence of grandmothers was related to a decreased hazard of death among children aged 1‒5, and the presence of aunts and uncles was beneficial to survival for children aged 5‒12. Mothers were especially important to children's survival, particularly during infancy, likely due to the importance of maternal care and breastfeeding on survival. During childhood, however, it appears that the presence of extended kin was also important, implying that children's care could have been provided by other family members once children were weaned. These findings closely align with those of other studies and reflect the importance of extended kin networks on childhood survival across time and space.

This research note discusses one underexplored aspect of the study of polygyny, namely, the extent to which the practice remains viable from a purely demographic standpoint. Using data from the United Nations World Population Prospects 2022 covering 48 countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), I evaluate a simple indicator-gamma-for capturing the "demographic potential" of polygyny, that is, the fraction of men who can have two wives with no other man pushed out of the marriage market. I estimate how this indicator has evolved between 1950 and 2021 across regions of SSA and show how the measure correlates with polygyny estimates from available men's and women's Demographic and Health Surveys. Gamma shows inverted U-curve patterns aligned with stages of the demographic transition, from modestly low levels to high levels during periods of rapid population growth and then declining again. Recent declines are starkest in South SSA, while potential remains moderate elsewhere. Gamma correlates positively with polygyny estimates from Demographic and Health Surveys-particularly in Central and South SSA-and can explain up to 50‒70% variation in polygyny, albeit not everywhere. Findings primarily hold within regions, suggesting this is one of manifold factors at play. I conclude by outlining fruitful directions for the study of polygyny.

Great-grandparents are key figures in the transmission of family history and values. Despite their recognized importance, there is scant population-based research estimating the prevalence of great-grandparents in the contemporary United States. This research note uses the most recently available nationally representative survey data to characterize great-grandparenthood in the United States from 1996 until 2012, when the Health and Retirement Study ceased asking harmonizable great-grandparenthood questions. The prevalence of great-grandparenthood increases steadily with age, from 11% of 60‒64-year-olds, to just over half at ages 80‒84, to about two thirds of those 90 or older. There has been surprising little change over the cohorts prior to the baby boom, but cohorts born after 1942 have lower rates of great-grandparenthood in their 50s and early 60s. Great-grandparenthood is somewhat more prevalent among women than men and is strongly patterned by educational attainment, with distinct patterns and levels for those with and without a college degree. Finally, we estimate that the number of great-grandparents in the United States has increased from 15.3 million in 1996 to 20.4 million in 2012, highlighting a 33% increase. This increase is due to population aging, coming despite slight declines in the proportion of individuals over 50 with great-grandchildren.

As part of the largest and most expensive state-run immigration program in U.S. history, the state of Texas bused more than 100,000 immigrants to six Democratic-led cities with sanctuary ordinances between 2022 and 2024. In this research note, we examine whether the Texas migrant busing program led to an increase in Hispanic homelessness in cities that received buses chartered by the state. Using point-in-time data measuring local homeless populations from the Department of Housing and Urban Development and administrative data from the Office of the Texas Governor to identify busing destinations, we apply a series of fixed-effects individual slope models to estimate the impact of Texas's busing program on local rates of Hispanic homelessness. We find that the busing program led to an annual increase of 36% in Hispanic homelessness in destination cities relative to prebusing trends. These results are robust to counterfactuals showing that the busing program had no impact on non-Hispanic homelessness, consistent with the predominantly Hispanic composition of bused migrants. Our findings underscore the detrimental impact of the Texas busing program on Hispanic homelessness and offer policy solutions to mitigate its effects.

The well-established finding that migrants tend to be lonelier than their counterparts without a migration background in the country of settlement is typically ascribed to challenges that come with international migration. This study's point of departure is that migrants' high levels of loneliness may, in part, also reflect what could be called a "lonely migrant effect," that is, selection of lonely people into international migration. Selection of this kind was assessed using the 2012 and 2016 rounds of the Dutch Public Health Monitor (n = 685,088), enriched with administrative data on emigration in the three years following survey data collection. Overall, 2,401 respondents emigrated from the Netherlands in this period. Emigration was regressed on respondents' baseline loneliness scores in logistic regression models adjusted for various potential confounders. Results indicate that people who were lonely, as indicated by a 3+ score on the De Jong Gierveld loneliness scale, were approximately 1.27 times as likely as their nonlonely peers to emigrate in the observed period. No significant differences were found between people who were moderately lonely and people who were severely lonely. These findings suggest that elevated loneliness among migrants may partly reflect preexisting loneliness and should be interpreted with this selection effect in mind.

This article presents an analysis of the relationship between kin propinquity, residential mobility, and the persistence of segregation among ancestry groups living in Stockholm, Sweden. Residential segregation between Swedish and non-Swedish ancestry groups is established when immigrants first settle in Stockholm, which creates disparities in the spatial distribution of kin for the children of immigrants compared with their Swedish counterparts. Using agent-based models, we show how preferences to live near kin are sufficient to maintain existing segregation but are not sufficient to generate it. We then apply discrete choice models of residential mobility to longitudinal residential history data from Swedish population registers to estimate the effects of kin on the neighborhood choices of movers, ages 18‒30, during the 1998‒2017 period. We find that people are more likely to move to neighborhoods that are near to kin, net of controls for sorting by ancestry, socioeconomic status, and life course characteristics. Counterfactual simulations of residential mobility show that kin propinquity contributes to higher levels of segregation between Swedish and non-Swedish ancestry groups. These effects are larger for groups already experiencing high levels of segregation from the Swedish majority. We situate these findings in the emerging literature on social structural sorting.

Increasing evidence links exposure to extreme weather events in utero with adverse health outcomes at birth, including lower birth weight. This research, however, often faces data limitations because natural disasters may be localized, often affecting some neighborhoods but not others, whereas outcome data are often available only at higher geographic levels, such as counties. In this article, we introduce a novel strategy for estimating the effects of geographically bounded disasters when localized outcome data are unavailable. We employ this strategy to estimate the effect of exposure to severe tornadoes on infant birth weight in the United States from 1991 to 2017. We merge county-month data on singleton births with block-group-level monthly data on the paths of severe tornadoes and block-group data on the distribution of the population at risk of a birth. We then estimate difference-in-differences models in which the treatment variable is equal to the percentage of the population at risk of a birth affected by the tornado. This strategy results in an estimand that is both more interpretable and more policy-relevant than estimands from traditional models. Our findings demonstrate that exposure to a tornado during pregnancy reduced birth weight for Black mothers.

We construct a unique sibling dataset by linking multiple comprehensive administrative data sources in Taiwan. Using data on one million siblings, we estimate the effect of parental divorce occurring at ages 13‒18 on children's university admission. Our approach leverages differences in admission outcomes between siblings who experienced parental divorce before the national college entrance test at age 18 and those who experienced it afterward. The mother fixed-effects estimates reveal a significantly negative impact of parental divorce on children's university admission. Adolescents who experienced parental divorce faced a 10.8% reduction in the likelihood of entering any university and a 15.9% reduction in the likelihood of being admitted to a first-tier university. Additional analyses show that younger adolescents are more vulnerable to the negative effects of parental divorce than their older counterparts. Furthermore, the study finds nonnegative effects of parental job loss on university admission, suggesting that the adverse impacts of parental divorce are unlikely to operate through income disadvantage.

This research note focuses on accurately documenting the trends in educational resemblance between husbands and wives in South Korea over six decades, from 1960 to 2020. Having undergone rapid social changes in recent history, including industrialization, economic development, and educational expansion, Korea offers a compelling context for studying long-term changes in educational assortative mating across different stages of development. Using 2% microsamples from 13 census datasets collected between 1960 and 2020, we construct marriage tables cross-classifying six educational levels of husbands and wives, both aged 25 to 45. Log-multiplicative layer effect models are applied to assess the husband‒wife association, controlling for changing marginal distributions of both spouses' educational levels. Our analysis of 843,527 married couples shows that the association between husbands' and wives' education increases to a peak around 1995, after which it continuously declines. The inverted U-shape trend remains robust whether analyzing current or first marriages of varying duration and across different types of log-linear models. We provide theoretical and empirical discussions of major macro-level trends, especially the timing and gendered patterns of educational expansion, in Korea to contextualize the observed patterns of educational assortative mating.