Demography最新文献

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.

The sex ratio at birth (SRB) in Spain jumped abruptly in the late 1970s and temporarily reached values of more than 109 boys per 100 girls in the early 1980s. This article shows that health care system expansion increased the likelihood of male births in Spain between 1975 and 1995. By facilitating the delivery of preterm and dystocic babies and improving overall maternal conditions, these developments increased the survival chances of male fetuses, who are biologically weaker than females. However, biological factors alone cannot explain the biased SRB. Our analysis shows that the availability of prenatal sex determination technologies and a strong son preference nurtured by the Francoist dictatorship fostered gender-biased behaviors that resulted in an excessively high SRB. The lack of evidence on sex-specific abortions suggests that women took better care of themselves when carrying a son. The spread of gender-egalitarian values brought about by the end of the dictatorship and the transition to democracy undermined son preference and returned the SRB to normal levels.

Wealth matters for children's well-being. However, most research has considered only the wealth held in children's resident households, even though more than one quarter of U.S. children have a parent living elsewhere. We provide the first national estimates of nonresident parent wealth among children who ever lived with both parents in a shared household. We use the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (1984-2021)-whose survey design enables us to produce unbiased estimates with respect to factors that condition access to nonresident parents-to describe the characteristics of nonresident parent wealth, children's potential access to it, and its contribution to educational attainment. We find that nonresident parent wealth varies substantially and that the rank-rank correlation between nonresident and resident parent wealth is roughly .3. Nonresident parent wealth is positively predictive of more frequent parent-child contact, more consistent and higher value child support payments, and children's bachelor's degree attainment, suggesting that it is related to multiple domains of parenting and child well-being. The findings demonstrate that accounting for the spread of resources across households, but within a family system, is critical to understanding broader patterns of inequality in American family life.

Climate change and population settlement patterns are altering the severity and spatial dimensions of flooding. Despite associational evidence linking flood exposure to population health in the United States, few studies have used counterfactual strategies to address confounding or examined how sociospatial determinations of risk, such as floodplain delineation, affect well-being. Using the case of Hurricane Harvey, I leverage novel, repeated cross-sectional health survey data from Houston immediately predisaster (N = 2,540) and six to nine months postdisaster (N = 2,798), linked to local flood inundation and floodplain data. Difference-in-differences models show that the probability of psychological distress and fair/poor health increased significantly in the flooded treatment group, with mixed evidence on unhealthy mental health days and no change in unhealthy physical health days. Triple-difference estimators further reveal buffered mental health adversity for those in flooded areas with high floodplain areal coverage relative to little or no floodplains. Descriptive analyses of mechanisms suggest that floodplain coverage did not differentiate individual-level disaster exposure but increased the likelihood of disaster preparedness and evacuation. This article offers insights into the climate-health nexus empirically by using a causal framework to improve credibility and conceptually by demonstrating how an underexamined dimension of vulnerability-sociospatial risk determinations-can stratify population health.