Demography最新文献

I document the transmission of a grandfather's net nutritional deprivation and psychosocial stress in young adulthood across multiple generations using the grandfather's ex-prisoner of war (ex-POW) status in the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865). Using a newly created dataset, I uncover an association between a grandfather's ex-POW status and the longevity after age 45 of his sons and male-line grandsons but not of his daughters, granddaughters, female-line grandsons, children-in-law, or grandchildren-in-law. Male-line grandsons lost roughly a year of life at age 45 (4% of remaining life expectancy) if descended from ex-POWs who suffered severe captivity conditions than if descended from non-POWs. If their grandfathers faced a less harsh captivity, male-line grandsons lost less than a year of life compared with those descended from non-POWs. I find that the grandfather's age at exposure and the grandson's education, as well as the son's and the grandson's poor late gestational conditions (proxied by season of birth), mediate this relationship. I rule out socioeconomic status, marriage and mortality selection, and cultural or psychological transmission from grandfathers to grandsons as explanations. I cannot rule out an epigenetic explanation.

An extensive literature has examined the relationship between birth spacing and subsequent health outcomes for parents, particularly for mothers. However, this research has drawn almost exclusively on observational research designs, and almost all studies have been limited to adjusting for observable factors that could confound the relationship between birth spacing and health outcomes. In this study, we use Norwegian register data to examine the relationship between birth spacing and the number of general practitioner consultations for mothers' and fathers' physical and mental health concerns immediately after childbirth (1-5 and 6-11 months after childbirth), in the medium term (5-6 years after childbearing), and in the long term (10-11 years after childbearing). To examine short-term health outcomes, we estimate individual fixed-effects models: we hold constant factors that could influence parents' birth spacing behavior and their health, comparing health outcomes after different births to the same parent. We apply sibling fixed effects in our analysis of medium- and long-term outcomes, holding constant mothers' and fathers' family backgrounds. The results from our analyses that do not apply individual or sibling fixed effects are consistent with much of the previous literature: shorter and longer birth intervals are associated with worse health outcomes than birth intervals of approximately 2-3 years. Estimates from individual fixed-effects models suggest that particularly short intervals have a modest negative effect on maternal mental health in the short term, with more ambiguous evidence that particularly short or long intervals might modestly influence short-, medium-, and long-term physical health outcomes. Overall, these results are consistent with small to negligible effects of birth spacing behavior on (non-pregnancy-related) parental health outcomes.

Although growing research has emphasized the critical importance of studying returns for understanding various aspects of migration processes, knowledge regarding return migrants' fertility behaviors remains limited. This study addresses this knowledge gap by comparing rates of first births and completed fertility among three groups: nonmigrants (at origin), migrants, and return migrants. Using extensive data collected both in the home regions and at destination, we analyze female migration from Martinique, Guadeloupe, French Guiana, and Réunion Island to metropolitan France (European France). We find intermediate fertility behaviors for return migrants relative to nonmigrants and migrants: on average, completed fertility levels are lower among return migrants than nonmigrants but slightly higher among return migrants than migrants. Some of these differences can be attributed to selection into migration and return, although significant gaps persist among women with similar socioeconomic characteristics. Our findings highlight three key observations. First, when migrants return before beginning childbearing, their transition to motherhood closely resembles that of nonmigrants with similar characteristics. Second, the lower fertility rates among prospective return migrants indicate an anticipation of disruption effects. Finally, reduced fertility while residing in metropolitan France translates into lower completed fertility rates for return migrants.

When will the human population peak? In this article, we build on classical results by Ansley Coale, who showed that when fertility declines steadily, births reach their maximum before fertility reaches replacement level, and the decline in total population size does not occur until several decades after fertility has reached that level. We extend Coale's results by modeling longevity increases, net immigration, and a slowdown in fertility decline that resembles current projections. With these extensions, our models predict a typical lag between replacement-level fertility and population decline of about 35 to 40 years, consistent with projections by the United Nations and about 15 years longer than the lag predicted by Coale. Our analysis helps reveal underlying factors in the timing of peak population.

Research on the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States has consistently found disproportionately high mortality among ethnoracial minorities, but reports differ with respect to the magnitude of mortality disparities and reach different conclusions regarding which groups were most impacted. We suggest that these variations stem from differences in the temporal scope of the mortality data used and difficulties inherent in measuring race and ethnicity. To circumvent these issues, we link Social Security Administration death records for 2010 through 2021 to decennial census and American Community Survey race and ethnicity responses. We use these linked data to estimate excess all-cause mortality for age-, sex-, race-, and ethnicity-specific subgroups and examine ethnoracial variation in excess mortality across states and over the course of the pandemic's first year. Results show that non-Hispanic American Indians and Alaska Natives experienced the highest excess mortality of any ethnoracial group in the first year of the pandemic, followed by Hispanics and non-Hispanic Blacks. Spatiotemporal and age-specific ethnoracial disparities suggest that the socioeconomic determinants driving health disparities prior to the pandemic were amplified and expressed in new ways in the pandemic's first year to disproportionately concentrate excess mortality among racial and ethnic minorities.

Despite increasing interest in the circumstances and outcomes of only children in the demographic literature, the conceptualization of this group has received limited scholarly attention. This research note argues for greater engagement by demographers and social scientists in the conceptualization and identification of only children by addressing three aims. First, we outline potential definitions of only children, present a framework to guide researchers' decisions, and evaluate whether only children can be reliably identified using the British birth cohort studies. Second, we show that the prevalence estimates are contingent on the timing of measurement in childhood, indicating the need for caution when deriving only-child status from cross-sectional household grid data. Third, we demonstrate that both the size and the characteristics of the only-child group may differ across definitions, highlighting that the accurate operationalization of some definitions is particularly restricted by survey designs that prioritize mothers for data collection on children and families. We argue that researchers interested in sole children's outcomes must choose the most appropriate measure for a given research question and, given that many datasets limit how accurately any indicator of only children can capture the chosen definition, reflect on how the operationalization of their measure might affect the results.

Intergenerational transmission processes have long been of interest to demographers, but prior research on the intergenerational transmission of criminal justice contact is relatively sparse and limited by its lack of attention to the correlated "family troubles" and familial incarceration that predate criminal justice contact. In this article, we provide a test of the intergenerational transmission of criminal justice contact after adjusting extensively for these factors that predate such contact by linking longitudinal data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods with official arrest histories from 1995 to 2020. The results provide support for three conclusions. First, parental criminal justice contact is associated with a shorter time to first arrest and a larger number of arrests even after rigorously accounting for selection. Second, robustness checks demonstrate that neither the magnitude nor the significance of the findings is sensitive to model choices. Third, associations are strongest among White individuals and inconsistently significant for African American and Hispanic individuals. Despite large recent crime declines, the results indicate that parental criminal justice contact elevates the criminal justice contact of the adult children of the prison boom, independent of the often-overlooked troubles that predate criminal justice contact, and that these associations are strongest among the White population.

The timing and structure of fertility have important implications for individuals and society. Families play a critical role in fertility; however, little is known about how parental incarceration shapes fertility despite it being a common experience in the life course of disadvantaged children. This study examines the consequences of parental incarceration for children's fertility using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997. I employ multiple-decrement life tables and survival analyses to estimate the relationship between parental incarceration and fertility. Individuals who experience parental incarceration have different timing of fertility, with earlier first births and a quicker pace of subsequent births, as well as more nonmarital fertility, compared with those who do not experience parental incarceration. This analysis finds consistent evidence that parental incarceration is associated with the timing and structure of fertility and suggests that a parent's incarceration carries consequences over the life course of children. This study advances our understanding of how mass incarceration shapes American families, illustrates how the broader consequences of mass incarceration contribute to social inequality, and provides evidence that the enduring implications of incarceration span multiple generations.

Recent scholarship indicates that sexual minority adults have higher caregiving rates than heterosexuals and that women are more likely to be caregivers than men. However, little research has addressed how gender and sexuality intersect in shaping caregiving status. This study uses data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System and aggregates a probability-based sample of adults living in 36 U.S. states between 2015 and 2021. We examine who provides care among adult heterosexual, lesbian, gay, and bisexual men and women. Results reveal that women are more likely to be caregivers than men, but only among heterosexuals. We find little variation in caregiving by sexuality among women, but bisexual men are more likely than heterosexual men to be caregivers; the latter result appears to be driven by unpartnered, bisexual men. Lastly, we contextualize caregivers' experiences and reveal selected descriptive differences in patterns of care recipient-caregiver relationships across gender and sexual identity groups. Our findings advance understanding of caregiving and changing family ties in an era of population aging and increasing diversity in sexual identities.

Intensive agriculture and deep plowing caused topsoil erosion and dust storms during the 1930s, affecting agricultural income and land values for years. Given the growing literature on the relevance of in utero and early-life exposures, it is surprising that studies focusing on links between the Dust Bowl and later-life health have produced inconclusive and mixed results. We reevaluate this literature and study the long-term effects of in utero and early-life exposure to topsoil erosion caused by the 1930s Dust Bowl on old-age longevity. Specifically, using Social Security Administration death records linked with the full-count 1940 census, we conduct event studies with difference-in-differences designs to compare the longevity of individuals in high- versus low-topsoil-erosion counties before versus after 1930. We find intent-to-treat reductions in longevity of approximately 0.85 months for those born in high-erosion counties after 1930. We show that these effects are not an artifact of preexisting trends in longevity. Additional analyses suggest that the effects are more pronounced among children raised in farm households, females, and those whose mothers had lower education. We also provide suggestive evidence that reductions in adulthood income are a likely mechanism for the effects we document.