Demography最新文献

Understanding widowhood duration is essential for individuals and effective widow support policies, yet widowhood duration remains an understudied topic. In this article, we provide a quantitative estimation of the impact of three primary determinants of expected widowhood duration at age 60 in a unified framework: (1) the degree of overlap between male and female mortality distributions, (2) the spousal age gap, and (3) the dependence of spousal mortality. Using French life tables from 1962 to 2070 and simulations based on the Gompertz law and a bivariate Gaussian copula, we assess each determinant's relative influence. Our findings show that ignoring spousal mortality dependence overestimates widowhood duration by three years, whereas disregarding the spousal age gap underestimates it by one year. In France, expected widowhood duration at age 60 in 2020 was 10.4 years for females and 5.8 years for males. Despite converging gender life expectancies, our projections suggest that widowhood duration will remain high until 2070, at 9.2 years for females and 6.2 years for males. Notably, we identify a negative gradient in widowhood duration along the standard-of-living distribution.

In this research note, we used excess deaths among young males to estimate the number of Russian fatalities in the Russo-Ukrainian war in 2022-2023. We based our calculations on the official mortality statistics, split by age and sex. To separate excess deaths due to war from those due to COVID-19, we relied on the ratio of male to female deaths and extrapolated the 2015-2019 trend to get the baseline value for 2022-2023. We found noticeable excess male mortality in all age groups between 15 and 49, with 58,500 ± 2,500 excess male deaths in 2022-2023 (20,600 ± 1,400 in 2022 and 37,900 ± 1,500 in 2023). These estimates were obtained after excluding all HIV-related deaths that showed complex dynamics unrelated to the war. Depending on the modeling assumptions, the estimated number of deaths over the two years varied from about 46,600 to about 64,100, with 58,500 corresponding to our preferred model. Our estimate should be treated as a lower bound on the true number of deaths because the data do not include either the Russian military personnel missing in action and not officially declared dead or the deaths registered in the Ukrainian territories annexed in 2022.

Adolescent women aged 19 or younger make up a substantial and growing proportion of women of reproductive age in low- and middle-income countries. Several key features of the reproductive life course ground the need to disaggregate the contraceptive behaviors of adolescent women from those of older women, including relationship dynamics, resources and autonomy, and cultural and societal expectations regarding sexual activity and childbearing. Despite the importance and unique life course features of adolescent women, we lack the information about their contraceptive dynamics-especially their patterns of contraceptive discontinuation-needed to direct improvements to family planning programs for this oft-neglected group. We use Demographic and Health Surveys from 55 countries to describe contraceptive dynamics among adolescent women, comparing them with trends among women aged 20-49. We find that adolescent women tended to use reversible, short-acting methods, whereas those later in the reproductive life course tended to use long-acting methods and female sterilization. Across all regions, 12-month all-method discontinuation rates among those who discontinued their method while not wanting to get pregnant ranged from 16.7 to 34.2 discontinuations per person-month for adolescent women and from 12.0 to 28.8 discontinuations per person-month for older women. Side effects and health concerns were a leading discontinuation reason for both age groups in most regions, and infrequent sex and desire to become pregnant were more frequent discontinuation reasons for adolescent women in most regions. Not since 2009 have scholars compared contraceptive discontinuation rates across multiple countries and disaggregated by age. Furthermore, no prior publication has compared specific reasons for discontinuation between adolescent and older women. Understanding the distinct contraceptive dynamics of those earliest in their reproductive life course can help direct policy and programmatic interventions.

As cash transfer policies have gained traction in recent years, interest in how financial resources could impact fertility has also grown. Increasing an individual's purchasing power with additional economic resources, such as those provided in unconditional cash transfers, might better enable parents to meet their fertility and reproductive goals, whether those goals are to become pregnant and give birth or to avoid or terminate pregnancies. In this research note, we provide new experimental evidence of the causal impact of a monthly unconditional cash transfer on fertility-related outcomes for U.S. families with at least one young child and low incomes. We find trends of increased pregnancy after three years but no corresponding impacts on births, miscarriages, or terminations. Our findings might indicate that modest cash transfers to mothers with low incomes in the United States are unlikely to have substantial impacts on fertility.

This article aims to investigate the relationship between social fathering, defined as the experience of men who are married to or cohabiting with the biological mother of a child to whom they are not biologically related, and childlessness. The point of departure is the increasing childlessness in Norway and most Western countries. Using Norwegian administrative register data on men born in 1980, including complete partnership histories covering 18 years, we estimate the relationship between social fatherhood and childlessness at age 42. Men's partnership histories were defined using sequence analysis. Our results show that men who experience social fathering are more likely to be childless than those who do not. However, the relationship between social fathering and childlessness is not uniform: childlessness varies by the duration, timing, and complexity of partnerships. Men with transient and short-term social fathering experiences and unstable, complex partnership histories are more likely to remain childless. Men in long-term partnerships who experience social fathering are more likely to remain childless than men in long-term partnerships without such experience.

The trend of increasing U.S. working-age (25-64) mortality is well-documented. Yet, our understanding of its causes is incomplete, and analyses are often limited to using population data with little information on individual behaviors and characteristics. One characterization of this trend centers on the role of despair as a catalyst for self-destructive behaviors that ultimately manifest in mortality from suicide and substance use. The role of despair in predicting mortality at the individual level has received limited empirical interrogation. Using Cox proportional hazards models with behavioral risk factors and latent variable measures of despair in young adulthood (ages 24-32 in 2008-2009) as focal predictors, we estimate subsequent mortality risk through 2022 (298 deaths among 12,277 individuals; 177,628 person-years of exposure). We find that suicidal ideation, suicide attempts, illegal drug use, and prescription drug abuse in young adulthood predict all-cause, suicide, and drug poisoning mortality. Notably, all four domains of despair (cognitive, emotional, biosomatic, and behavioral) and overall despair predict all-cause mortality and mortality from drug poisoning and suicide. This research note provides new empirical evidence regarding the relationship between individual despair and mortality, improving our understanding of the life course contributors to working-age mortality.

We revisit much-investigated relationships between schooling and health, focusing on schooling impacts on cognitive abilities at older ages using the Harmonized Cognition Assessment Protocol in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and a bounding approach that requires relatively weak assumptions. Our estimated upper bounds on the population average effects indicate potentially large causal effects of increasing schooling from primary to secondary. Yet, these upper bounds are smaller than many estimates from studies of causal schooling impacts on cognition using compulsory schooling laws. We also cannot rule out small and null effects at this margin. However, we find evidence for positive causal effects on cognition of increasing schooling from secondary to tertiary. We replicate findings from the HRS using data on older adults from the Midlife in United States Development Study Cognitive Project. We further explore possible mechanisms behind the schooling effect (e.g., health, socioeconomic status, occupation, and spousal schooling), finding suggestive evidence of effects through such mechanisms.

Spousal loss is associated with an immediate increase in depressive symptoms. However, the consequences of widowhood for symptoms of depression during the COVID-19 pandemic have remained largely unexplored. In this study, we use data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe and fixed-effects regression modeling to address three research questions. First, how have depressive symptoms changed over time in 10 European countries for older adults by marital status and spousal death timing? Second, do the surviving spouses of persons who died during the pandemic face greater increases in depressive symptoms compared with adults widowed before the pandemic? Third, to what extent did the strictness of government restrictions moderate the pandemic widowhood penalty for symptoms of depression? We find that depressive symptoms increased dramatically for those widowed during the pandemic compared with widowed adults before the pandemic. In addition, the pandemic widowhood penalty does not apply to all those who lost their partners during the pandemic; it applies only to those who lost their partner when governments were enforcing stay-at-home orders. Our findings support the notion that the COVID-19 pandemic and stringent government restrictions exacerbated risk factors and hindered protective factors that affect older adults' resilience to spousal death.

Educational disparities in mothers' parenting time have implications for socioeconomic inequality in children's resources and later life attainment. The reproduction of inequality could be more consequential if educational disparities are most pronounced at child ages when a specific parenting need is more developmentally important. Following recent findings suggesting a general reduction in the educational gradient in mothers' overall parenting time, this study aims to determine if this convergence extends to the developmental gradient in parenting. Using the American Time Use Survey from 2003 to 2019 (N = 34,232), this study finds that educational disparities in mothers' parenting time have narrowed in accordance with the developmental gradient. Economic, cultural, and demographic changes that might contribute to the narrowing trends are discussed. These findings offer an updated understanding of educational gaps in maternal parenting strategies, with potential impacts on the intergenerational transmission of (dis)advantage.

Current literature states that early-life exposure to smoking produces adverse health outcomes in later life, primarily as a result of subsequent engagements with firsthand smoking. The implications of prior research are that smoking cessation can reduce health risk in later life to levels comparable to the risk of those who have never smoked. However, recent evidence suggests that smoking exposure during childhood can have independent and permanent negative effects on health-in particular, on epigenetic aging. This investigation examines whether the effect of early-life firsthand smoking on epigenetic aging is more consistent with (1) a sensitive periods model, which is characterized by independent effects due to early firsthand exposures; or (2) a cumulative risks model, which is typified by persistent smoking. The findings support both models. Smoking during childhood can have long-lasting effects on epigenetic aging, regardless of subsequent engagements. Our evidence suggests that adult cessation can be effective but that the epigenetic age acceleration in later life is largely due to early firsthand smoking itself.