Demography最新文献

This research note reinvestigates Abdellaoui et al.'s (2019) findings that genetically selective migration may lead to persistent and accumulating socioeconomic and health inequalities between types (coal mining or non-coal mining) of places in the United Kingdom. Their migration measure classified migrants who moved to the same type of place (coal mining to coal mining or non-coal mining to non-coal mining) into "stay" categories, preventing them from distinguishing migrants from nonmigrants. We reinvestigate the question of genetically selective migration by examining migration patterns between places rather than place types and find genetic selectivity in whether people migrate and where. For example, we find evidence of positive selection: people with genetic variants correlated with better education moved from non-coal mining to coal mining places with our measure of migration. Such findings were obscured in earlier work that could not distinguish nonmigrants from migrants.

More than one third of U.S. children spend part of their childhood living with extended family members. By age 18, nearly 40% of U.S. children experience a household change involving a nonparent. Research has found that having extended family or nonrelatives join or leave children's households negatively affects children's educational attainment. I argue that we need new ways of theorizing, conceptualizing, and measuring household changes and their effects on children. I use the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and marginal structural models with inverse probability of treatment weighting to estimate the association between household changes involving parents and nonparents and teen childbearing among girls. I find that experiencing household changes involving nonparents and parents during childhood is associated with a significantly higher probability of having a child as a teenager than experiencing no changes. In addition, the association between changes involving parents and teen childbearing is statistically indistinguishable from the association between changes involving nonparents and teen childbearing, suggesting that household composition shifts involving nonparents can be as disruptive to girls as those involving parents.

In 2021, the federal government of the United States expanded a set of income transfers that led to strong reductions in child poverty. This research note uses microdata from more than 50 countries and U.S. data spanning more than 50 years to place the 2021 child poverty rate in historical and international perspective. We demonstrate that whether using the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), relative poverty measures, or an absolute poverty measure, the U.S. child poverty rate in 2021 was at its lowest level since at least 1967. The U.S. tax and transfer system reduced the 2021 SPM child poverty rate by more than 75% relative to the pre-tax/transfer child poverty rate; this reduction was three times the mean reduction effect between 1967 and 2019. These policy changes improved the country's standing from having a relative poverty rate twice that of Germany's in 2019 to the same as Germany's in 2021. Moreover, the U.S. progressed from reducing child poverty at less than half the rate of Norway in 2019 to a rate comparable to Norway in 2021. However, the U.S. success was temporary: after the expiration of the 2021 income provisions, the child poverty rate doubled and returned to being higher than in most other high-income countries.

In this research note, we demonstrate that trends in the likelihood of child support agreements differ by marital history (i.e., never-married vs. ever-married) and by whether measures rely on the stock of families (i.e., all those in which children live apart from a parent) or the flow (i.e., those that include children who newly live apart from a parent) in a given year. While previous research has highlighted difference by marital history, the contrast between stock and flow is a new contribution. Trends are typically measured with reference to the stock of cases, even while the flow of cases, which more immediately reflects concurrent policy changes, is more relevant in many contexts. Interpretations of recent declines in child support agreements in the stock of cases-referenced as evidence for both mandating participation and the impracticality of requiring child support-may be better informed by considering the flow of cases. We find the flow of previously married mothers increasingly likely to have child support agreements while the likelihood is relatively consistent over time for never-married mothers. For both groups, using the flow measure, we find notable increases in agreements without payments due in the most recent period. These findings underscore the importance of differentiating stock and flow, and by marital history, in considering the proportion with agreements as an indicator of the effectiveness of current policy.

Studies have examined the racial disparities in household characteristics, homeownership, and familial transfer as primary drivers of the Black-White wealth gap in the United States. This study assesses the importance of stock-linked assets in generating wealth inequality. As financial assets become a growing component of household portfolios, the Black-White wealth gap is increasingly associated with the racial disparity in stock-linked assets. Using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this study shows that the contribution of stock-linked assets to the Black-White wealth gap has expanded in both absolute and relative terms, surpassing those of homeownership and business equity. Furthermore, a substantial disparity in financial wealth exists even for otherwise similar Black and White households. Although the disparity is larger among those with more economic resources, a gap remains among those with less. Lastly, our analysis shows that the combination of lower ownership levels and lower returns on financial wealth among Black households could account for a quarter of the Black-White wealth accumulation gap, net of differences in current net worth and household characteristics. Our findings suggest that considering financial assets is critical for understanding contemporary racial wealth inequality.

This article documents child suicide rates from 1980 to 2020 in the United States using the National Vital Statistics System Multiple Cause of Death database. After generally declining for decades, suicide rates among children aged 10-17 accelerated from 2011 to 2018 in an unprecedented rise in both duration and magnitude. I consider the role of the illicit opioid crisis in driving this mental health crisis. In August 2010, an abuse-deterrent version of OxyContin was introduced and the original formulation was removed from the market, leading to a shift to illicit opioids and stimulating growth in illicit opioid markets. Areas more exposed to reformulation-as measured by pre-reformulation rates of OxyContin misuse in the National Survey on Drug Use and Health-were more affected by the transition to illicit opioids and experienced sharper growth in child suicide rates. The evidence suggests that children's illicit opioid use did not increase, implying that the illicit opioid crisis engendered higher suicide propensities by increasing suicidal risk factors for children, such as increasing rates of child neglect and altering household living arrangements. In complementary analyses, I document how living conditions declined for children during this time period.

Drawing cohort profiles and cohort forecasts from grids of age-period data is common practice in demography. In this research note, we (1) show how demographic measures artificially fluctuate when calculated from the diagonals of age-period rates because of timing and cohort-size bias, (2) estimate the magnitude of these biases, and (3) illustrate how prediction intervals for cohort indicators of mortality may become implausible when drawn from Lee-Carter methods and age-period grids. These biases are surprisingly large, even when the cohort profiles are created from single-age, single-year period data. The danger is that we overinterpret deviations from expected trends that were induced by our own data manipulation.

Despite the prominence of the weathering hypothesis as a mechanism underlying racialized inequities in morbidity and mortality, the life course social and economic determinants of Black-White disparities in biological aging remain inadequately understood. This study uses data from the Health and Retirement Study (n = 6,782), multivariable regression, and Kitagawa-Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition to assess Black-White disparities across three measures of biological aging: PhenoAge, Klemera-Doubal biological age, and homeostatic dysregulation. It also examines the contributions of racial differences in life course socioeconomic and stress exposures and vulnerability to those exposures to Black-White disparities in biological aging. Across the outcomes, Black individuals exhibited accelerated biological aging relative to White individuals. Decomposition analyses showed that racial differences in life course socioeconomic exposures accounted for roughly 27% to 55% of the racial disparities across the biological aging measures, and racial disparities in psychosocial stress exposure explained 7% to 11%. We found less evidence that heterogeneity in the associations between social exposures and biological aging by race contributed substantially to Black-White disparities in biological aging. Our findings offer new evidence of the role of life course social exposures in generating disparities in biological aging, with implications for understanding age patterns of morbidity and mortality risks.

Multistate modeling is a commonly used method to compute healthy life expectancy. However, there is currently no analytical method to decompose the components of differentials in summary measures calculated from multistate models. In this research note, we propose a derivative-based method to decompose the differentials in population-based health expectancies estimated via a multistate model into two main components: the proportion resulting from differences in initial health structure and the proportion resulting from differences in health transitions. We illustrate the method using data on activities of daily living from the U.S. Health and Retirement Study to decompose the sex differential in disability-free life expectancy (HLE) among older Americans. Our results suggest that the sex gap in HLE results primarily from differences in transition rates between disability states rather than from the initial health distribution of female and male populations. The methods introduced here will enable researchers, including those working in fields other than health, to decompose the relative contribution of initial population structure and transition probabilities to differences in state-specific life expectancies from multistate models.