Demography最新文献

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.

This research note examines the U.S. policy landscape of longevity by documenting life expectancy trends between 1990 and 2019 among Black and White men and women across state policy contexts, grouped by policy liberalism trajectories over the last 60 years. I estimate age group and cause-of-death contributions to the growth of the liberal state life expectancy advantage, which culminated in 2018-2019 to between 2.5 and 3.8 years. Notably, by 2018-2019, Black life expectancy, particularly among women, in liberal policy environments had surpassed or equaled White life expectancy in certain conservative contexts. Although clear policy gradients emerge for White populations, Black life expectancy appears to be less patterned across policy environments, with advantage concentrated in the most liberal states. The growth of the liberal advantage was driven primarily by improvements at younger ages (<50) and in HIV/AIDs and homicides among Black, particularly male, populations; in late adulthood (50-74) and in cancers, circulatory diseases, and respiratory diseases among White populations; and at the oldest ages (75+) and in mental and nervous system disorders among women. Negative contributions of drug-related mortality, particularly among men, suggest that the drug epidemic undermined further growth of the liberal state advantage.

Prior studies show that Hispanic and Black immigrants are more susceptible to disabilities and chronic diseases in their later years than U.S.-born Whites, despite their health advantage at younger ages. Such studies often rely on data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), which disproportionately includes immigrants who arrived decades ago. The shortage of research on immigrants of other ethnoracial groups further makes it unclear whether the old-age declines in health advantages among Hispanic and Black immigrants are generalizable. Using the up-to-date HRS and National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) data, this study compares the prevalences of chronic diseases, functional limitations, and activity limitations between U.S.-born Whites and immigrants of various ethnoracial identities across datasets. We find that Hispanic and Black immigrants in the HRS exhibit significantly greater disability disadvantages at older ages in relation to native-born Whites than those in the NHIS. Older White and Asian immigrants encounter no health disadvantages regardless of data source. We demonstrate that the especially low socioeconomic status of Hispanic immigrants in the HRS, along with the two surveys' different measurements of activity limitations, partly contributes to the discrepancies between the surveys. We suggest that the HRS design is conducive to undersampling of immigrants arriving more recently, leading to its immigrants' unique socioeconomic profiles. This study underscores the need for scholars of immigration and health to be cautious about dataset-specific nuances.

The undocumented immigrant population in the United States is aging and diversifying by origin group. However, research on aging among undocumented immigrants focuses on Mexicans and Central Americans, even as this population declines, and less is known about other groups. We analyze residual estimates of the undocumented population and the 2018‒2022 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation to document trends in age at arrival, duration in undocumented status, and socioeconomic and health correlates for undocumented immigrants across 27 countries or regions. We find dramatic increases in the older undocumented population across all origin groups, especially among those from Asia, the Caribbean, Europe, Canada, and Oceania. Aging in place drives population aging among the largest groups-those from Mexico, Central America, Venezuela, and India-while both aging in place and increases in arrivals at older ages are responsible for population aging among those from other origins. Additionally, undocumented status for older immigrants from most origins is associated with significant socioeconomic disadvantage regardless of age at arrival, but especially for those who age in place. This finding foreshadows rising inequality by legal status among America's seniors as the most disadvantaged immigrant groups age in place in coming decades.

Theories linking fertility decline to rising education levels among women and children have featured prominently in discussions of African fertility change. Using survey data from 33 countries, this article leverages cross-place and cross-cohort variation to assess these theories' relevance to the continent's transitions in both realized and desired fertility. Across countries and subnational regions, lower fertility is associated with greater education for both mothers and children. Across cohorts within a country or region, fertility decline remains associated with the educational progress of women but has at most a weak relationship with the educational progress of children. These findings corroborate existing evidence that women's education drives fertility change but indicate a more limited role for the interplay of the number of children and their education. Reductions in ideal family size more consistently predict children's educational progress, suggesting that this interplay may become more relevant to African fertility change as ideals shift and their implementation improves.

This study revisits the polygyny‒fertility relationship in sub-Saharan Africa amid significant sociodemographic transformations, including declines in both fertility rates and the prevalence of polygyny. Using data from multiple rounds of the Demographic and Health Surveys across 23 African countries, we examine the contribution of polygyny to reductions in the total fertility rate (TFR), explore how the polygyny‒fertility relationship has evolved over time, and assess changes in the total number of children ever born, number of recent births, ideal fertility, and the desire for another child by polygyny status. Our findings show that the decline in polygyny has substantially contributed to reductions in TFR. While realized fertility-measured by children ever born and recent births-has declined for all married women, reductions have been greater among women in monogamous unions. Fertility preferences, including ideal fertility and the desire for another child, have decreased only among women in monogamous unions, while remaining stable for those in polygynous unions. Additionally, except for children ever born, we find minimal variation in fertility outcomes by wife's rank within polygynous unions. Taken together, these results underscore the complex influence of marriage systems on fertility and highlight the distinct fertility patterns of women in monogamous versus polygynous unions.

Despite the well-documented health disadvantages of single motherhood, research on single fathers' health remains limited owing to scarce data on this growing population. The influence of life course factors, such as partnership history and timing, on single parents' health is also understudied. Using high-quality register data on the total Danish population, this study (1) compares the mortality risk of single and partnered parents and (2) investigates heterogeneity in single parents' mortality by considering pathways into single parenthood, repartnering, child age, and episode length. Results show that single fathers have the highest all-cause mortality risk of all parent groups. Cause-specific analyses suggest that they are at especially high risk of dying by suicide or substance abuse. Mortality rates are higher for mothers entering single parenthood through being unpartnered than through partnership loss. Repartnering mitigates the negative effects of single parenthood. Mothers experiencing single parenthood when their youngest child was aged 1‒5 have lower mortality risk than peers who became single mothers of teenagers. The length of time spent as a single parent does not influence mortality. These findings highlight considerable diversity in parents' longevity and underscore the need for further attention to the health disadvantages of single fathers.

Prior research on the mortality effects of retirement has rarely been informative in the sense of finding a statistically significant effect. However, this does not necessarily indicate the absence of a mortality effect of retirement. While earlier studies assumed an instantaneous change in mortality risk upon retirement, the mortality effect of retirement may cumulatively evolve upon retirement. Using the Health and Retirement Study and fuzzy regression discontinuity and kink designs, I estimate mortality effects of retirement and retirement duration. Consistent with prior work, I find no evidence for a sudden jump in mortality risk at retirement. By contrast, I find that each additional year of retirement duration increases mortality risk by 0.9 percentage points, suggesting growing inequalities in mortality risk between retirees and counterfactual nonretirees. The positive, cumulative mortality effect of retirement at the Social Security eligibility age has important implications for an increase in the eligibility age, population health, and welfare programs to support older people in the United States.

The risk of dementia is considerably lower among persons with a high educational attainment level than among less educated persons. This association has been documented across countries, cohorts, and populations. However, several questions remain unanswered. What is the rate of decline in dementia risk associated with additional education? Does the rate of decline with additional education differ across the education distribution? Are there key points in the education distribution that demark changes in the association, such as completing high school? Using the 2000-2018 Health and Retirement Study, we use a functional form approach to evaluate how dementia risk changes with each year of education among non-Hispanic White and Black older adults. We observe a linear decline in dementia incidence with increasing years of educational attainment, both before and after 12 years of education. This pattern is consistent across population subgroups. Additionally, dementia risk displays a step-change decline at 12 years of education, but this reduction is observed primarily among men and White adults. These findings underscore the significance of educational exposure in understanding population differences in dementia risk and future changes in the burden of dementia in the population.

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted nearly every aspect of economic and social life in the United States, especially education. This research note draws on student-level administrative data from one U.S. state to describe how trends in postsecondary enrollment changed during the pandemic. First, students were less likely to enroll in postsecondary institutions following high school graduation during the pandemic, and these declines were most prominent among lower income, Hispanic, and Black students. Second, rates of sustained enrollment in both the immediate year following high school graduation and the next year fell more substantially among lower income, Hispanic, and Black students during the pandemic than they did among higher income and White students. Third, students made different decisions about where to enroll: higher income, White, and Asian students increased their enrollment in public four-year schools, decreased their enrollment in private four-year schools, and were more likely to attend college in-state, whereas lower income, Black, and Hispanic students experienced broad declines across institutional sectors and locations. These results paint a picture of growing socioeconomic and racial and ethnic inequalities in whether and where students pursued postsecondary education, highlighting the unequal barriers placed on traditionally underserved high school graduates during the pandemic.