Demography最新文献

The number and age of kin determine the companionship and support individuals provide or receive. Over recent decades, fertility and mortality rates have changed considerably, with varying speeds across countries. We investigate the changes in kinship networks in response to time-varying demographic rates, with a focus on the speed of change. We start with stylized demographic trajectories to determine the separate effects of fertility and mortality. First, we find that differences in the number of living kin depend strongly on the speed of fertility decline. In a fast fertility transition (as in China), a 65-year-old could have 20% fewer daughters than a 70-year-old in a specific year. However, in a slow transition (as in India), this difference is only 7%. Second, the speed of fertility decline has large effects on the mean and variability of the ages of kin. Third, a cohort perspective provides valuable insight into the changes in the number and age of kin. Fourth, we show how changes in the age pattern of mortality affect kinship for individuals at different ages. We use these conclusions to examine and understand kin dynamics based on empirical demographic data from four illustrative countries (Thailand, Indonesia, Ghana, and Nigeria).

Prior research has consistently documented a more pronounced negative impact of parental separation on educational attainment among children from families with high socioeconomic status (SES). This study leverages molecular data to investigate how the parental separation penalty on educational attainment varies by SES and children's genetic propensity for education. We replicate the analysis on two distinct datasets, the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health and the Health and Retirement Study. We use parametric (ordinary least-squares and logit) and nonparametric models (LOWESS), with college attainment and years of education as the dependent variables and the mother's education as an indicator of family SES. Our results show that the parental separation penalty clusters among high-SES students with a low genetic propensity for education. For high-SES students with nonseparated parents, the probability of college attainment and completing more years of education is largely independent of their genetic propensity for education but decreases if they have a low genetic propensity for education and their parents separate. These findings suggest that when high-SES parents separate, they experience a reduced capacity to compensate for their children's low genetic propensity for education to boost college attainment and years of education.

We examine the prevalence of gender transitions in Sweden over time and document the sociodemographic characteristics of people transitioning in different periods. Using administrative data covering the transgender population from 1973 through 2020, we analyze two common events in a gender transition: the earliest diagnosis of gender incongruence and the change of legal gender. Our research note presents three main findings. First, the measured prevalence rates of diagnoses and legal gender changes are relatively low in all periods, although they have increased substantially since the early 2010s. Second, the recent increase in transition prevalence is most pronounced among people in early adulthood; in particular, young transgender men drive an increase in overall transition rates through 2018, followed by moderate declines in 2019 and 2020. Third, transgender men and women have substantially lower socioeconomic outcomes than cisgender men and women, regardless of the age at which they transition or the historical period. They are also considerably less likely to be in a legal union or reside with children. These findings highlight the continued economic and social vulnerability of the transgender population.

Recent research indicates that immigrants are more likely to experience chronic conditions and disabilities than natives at older ages, yet they continue to exhibit lower overall mortality, thus suggesting a morbidity-mortality paradox. We utilize the IPUMS National Health Interview Survey 2002-2018 with linked mortality data through 2019 (n = 405,270) to comprehensively investigate how this paradox unfolds with age for various groups of immigrants. The analysis shows that immigrants' advantages in chronic conditions and disabilities narrow or even disappear at old ages, whereas their mortality advantages continuously increase with age. These patterns exist for immigrants of different ethnoracial, sex, and educational groups. The decomposition analysis reveals that the narrowing disability gap is due to immigrants' increasing prevalence of mental illness and diabetes, shrinking advantages in lung diseases and musculoskeletal conditions, and increasing vulnerability to the disabling effects of major chronic conditions. However, immigrants are less likely to die from chronic diseases and disabilities, and this advantage strengthens with age, widening the nativity gap in mortality risk with age. We suggest that health-based selection might simultaneously postpone the onset of chronic diseases and disabilities to later ages for immigrants and better enable them to weather the mortality consequences of the diseases and disabilities.

Over the past few decades, U.S. cities have changed dramatically, largely because of two major trends: the fall of violence and the rise of urban inequality. Despite the attention given to each of these trends, little research has assessed how they are related to each other. This study is the first to generate causal evidence on the impact of violent crime on economic residential segregation. We document the effect of the crime drop on economic segregation in 500 U.S. cities between 1990 and 2010, using exogenous shocks to city crime rates to identify causal effects. We find that declining violent and property crime reduced low-income household segregation but had no effect on affluent households. Our findings indicate that the crime decline has not overturned the trend toward rising economic segregation but has slowed its pace. Additional analyses suggest that declining crime reduced low-income household segregation by drawing more White and college-educated residents to the poorest neighborhoods of 1990. We also find suggestive evidence that declining violence led poor households to migrate out of low-income neighborhoods, reflecting a pattern of gentrification. Descriptive analyses of tract-level data from five cities show that neighborhoods with sharper declines in violence became less socioeconomically disadvantaged. Despite continued rising economic inequality, the crime decline has had its greatest impact on concentrated poverty, long seen as one of the most harmful dimensions of urban inequality.

Parenting styles are often the focus of interventions aimed at mitigating disparities in children's well-being. Although research has sought to establish parenting differences across income groups, the extent to which income itself drives such differences is disputed. Little attention has focused on income volatility, despite its secular rise and recent salience and the links between volatility and parenting drawn by theories across the social and developmental sciences. I investigate whether and how income volatility affects parenting styles using data from the 2009-2022 UK Household Longitudinal Study and an empirical approach that addresses measured and unmeasured common causes of volatility and parenting. Self-reports of parenting styles are differently associated with income instability across income groups. Mothers with higher but more unstable household and labor incomes report lower warmth. When households accumulate benefit income, reports of harsh or more permissive practices become more frequent among mothers with higher incomes and less frequent among those with lower incomes. Despite instability due to labor income losses, fathers with lower incomes report higher warmth in their interactions with their children, whereas fathers with higher incomes report the opposite. These findings suggest that theories, public debates, and policies could be retailored to address the role of income changes in family life.

The fertility expectations of older women and men are becoming increasingly important for understanding fertility dynamics, given the increasing share of births after age 30. Because most health conditions deteriorate with age, understanding the relationship between health and fertility expectations is essential. We investigate whether changes in self-assessed general, physical, and mental health are linked to revised fertility expectations and how these associations vary over the life course. Drawing on a large longitudinal dataset for Australia, we demonstrate that across each health indicator, self-assessed poor health corresponds to lower fertility expectations and that a deterioration (or improvement) in self-assessed health coincides with a decrease (or increase) in men's and women's expectations of having a child. Individuals adapt their expectations more in response to physical health changes if they are older, and mental health conditions at younger ages appear relevant to men's fertility intentions. The results highlight that general, physical, and mental health are crucial drivers of changes in fertility plans, emphasizing the importance of integrating health considerations into future theoretical frameworks and empirical analyses of fertility.

The forced return of migrants is an important part of migration policy toolkits. An increased risk of deportation, politicians argue, will deter subsequent irregular migration. We explore this argument for the case of forced removals from the United States and find that rather than operating as a deterrent for future migrants, this policy had a boomerang effect. The forced return of migrants with a track record of crime generated negative externalities in the form of higher violence in their countries of origin, counteracting the deterrence effect of higher deportation risk. We apply mediation analysis to a panel of Latin American and Caribbean countries and decompose the effect of deportations on emigration into three coefficients of interest: a total effect of deportations on later emigration, an effect of deportations on the mediator variable of violence, and an effect of violence on emigration. We address the endogeneity of our key explanatory variables-deportations and violence-using migrants' exposure to the unequal and staggered implementation of policies intended to facilitate deportations at the level of U.S. states as a source of exogenous variation. We show that migration intentions and asylum requests increase in response to deportation threats. This effect is mediated through increased violence and is strongly driven by dynamics in Central America. Although the total number of apprehensions at the U.S. southern border in response to deportation threats does not show a clear pattern, we observe an increase in the share of unaccompanied minors and the share of entire family units among those apprehended, suggesting a shift in migration strategies and composition.

We analyze and quantify the ways the COVID-19 pandemic affected other causes of death in Brazil in 2020 and 2021. We decompose age-standardized mortality rate time series for 2010-2021 into three additive components: trend, seasonal, and remainder. Given the long-term trend and historical seasonal variation, we assume that most of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic will be left in the remainder. We use a regression model to test this assumption. We decompose the contributions of COVID-19 deaths (direct effect) and those of other causes (indirect effects) to the annual change in life expectancy at birth (e0) from 2017 to 2021. The COVID-19 pandemic not only increased rates for other causes of death but also decreased rates for some causes. Broadly, the remainders mirror the COVID-19 pandemic waves. The direct effects of the pandemic reduced e0 by 1.88 years in 2019-2020 and by 1.77 in 2020-2021. Indirect effects increased e0 by 0.44 in 2019-2020 and had virtually no effect on e0 in 2020-2021. Whether the trajectories of mortality rates and annual gains in e0 will return to prepandemic levels and their interregional gradients depend on whether a nonnegligible number of patients who recovered from COVID-19 will suffer premature mortality.

A growing literature investigates the levels, trends, causes, and effects of lifespan inequality. This work is typically based on measures that combine partial cohort histories into a synthetic cohort, most frequently in a period life table, or focus on single (completed) cohort analysis. We introduce a new cohort-based method-the overlapping cohorts perspective-that preserves individual cohort histories and aggregates them in a population-level measure. We apply these new methods to describe levels and trends in lifespan inequality and to assess temporary and permanent mortality changes in several case studies, including the surge of violent deaths in Colombia in the 1990s and 2000s and cause-deleted exercises for top mortality causes such as cardiovascular diseases and cancer. The results from our approach differ from those of existing methods in the timing, trends, and levels of the impact of these mortality developments on lifespan inequality, bringing new insights to the study of lifespan inequality.