Demography最新文献

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.

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.

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.

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.

This study introduces a demographic framework to analyze the social division of care work time, defined as the sum of paid and unpaid care work time provided to children and adults in a population. Combining data from the American Heritage Time Use Survey (AHTUS) and the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement (CPS-ASEC), we focus on routine interactive care and analyze how the volume and social division of this care work has evolved in the United States over a half century (1965-2018). Results reveal relative stability in the division of care work across domains (paid vs. unpaid and child vs. adult) but substantial change across social groups (by gender and race). The share of total care work provided by paid caregivers remained stable, challenging expectations about defamilialization, whereas the share of total care work going to adults increased over time. Gender and race inequality in total care work time experienced notable declines. Analyses show that these changes are driven by men's increased involvement in unpaid childcare and non-White women's declined involvement in some paid care jobs, respectively. Our framework provides new tools to examine how demographic, social, and economic changes impact the social organization of care work time.

Future fertility is a key input when charting the sustainability of social security systems, and declining fertility is often expected to put pressure on economic indicators, such as pension burden. Such expectations are based on a narrow view of the impact of fertility on the economy, focusing on age structure. Dynamic impacts-for instance, the potential for increased human capital for smaller cohorts-are mostly ignored. We use a dynamic longitudinal microsimulation model to explore the extent to which investments in human capital could offset the adverse economic impact of low fertility. Our research context is Finland, the fastest aging European country and the site of dramatic fertility declines and stagnant educational levels in the 2020s. We find that an ambitious but simple human capital investment strategy that keeps the total investment constant despite declining cohort size, thereby increasing per capita investment, can offset the negative impact of a smaller labor force on the pension burden. Human capital investment not only reduces pension burden but also increases working years, pension income, retirement years, and longevity. Policies focusing on human capital investment are likely a viable strategy to maintain economic sustainability.

Immigrant-native intermarriage has been shown to improve immigrant labor force outcomes. A parallel line of research demonstrates that immigrant employment outcomes are strongly influenced by the sociopolitical climate and overall reception immigrants receive upon arrival in the host society. Our research spans both strands of literature to address unresolved questions about how the association between immigrant-native intermarriage and foreign-born occupational status changes across host societies on the basis of their national-level polices and views toward outsiders. To assess this, we analyze substantive changes in immigrant occupational attainment across twenty European Union countries from 2008 to 2018 using individual-level, cross-sectional data from the European Union Labor Force Survey on occupational attainment merged with country-level data from the European Social Survey on attitudes toward outsiders and the Migrant Integration Policy Index on integration policies. Our findings show that the association between intermarriage and immigrant occupation status is stronger in countries with more welcoming policies, whereas attitudes toward outsiders do not have a significant effect net of the moderating role of policy. The novel use of occupational status along with the moderating effect of policy provides further evidence that closed societies impede immigrant integration while deepening immigrant marginalization.

Understanding widowhood duration is essential for individuals and effective widow support policies, yet widowhood duration remains an understudied topic. In this article, we provide a quantitative estimation of the impact of three primary determinants of expected widowhood duration at age 60 in a unified framework: (1) the degree of overlap between male and female mortality distributions, (2) the spousal age gap, and (3) the dependence of spousal mortality. Using French life tables from 1962 to 2070 and simulations based on the Gompertz law and a bivariate Gaussian copula, we assess each determinant's relative influence. Our findings show that ignoring spousal mortality dependence overestimates widowhood duration by three years, whereas disregarding the spousal age gap underestimates it by one year. In France, expected widowhood duration at age 60 in 2020 was 10.4 years for females and 5.8 years for males. Despite converging gender life expectancies, our projections suggest that widowhood duration will remain high until 2070, at 9.2 years for females and 6.2 years for males. Notably, we identify a negative gradient in widowhood duration along the standard-of-living distribution.

In this research note, we used excess deaths among young males to estimate the number of Russian fatalities in the Russo-Ukrainian war in 2022-2023. We based our calculations on the official mortality statistics, split by age and sex. To separate excess deaths due to war from those due to COVID-19, we relied on the ratio of male to female deaths and extrapolated the 2015-2019 trend to get the baseline value for 2022-2023. We found noticeable excess male mortality in all age groups between 15 and 49, with 58,500 ± 2,500 excess male deaths in 2022-2023 (20,600 ± 1,400 in 2022 and 37,900 ± 1,500 in 2023). These estimates were obtained after excluding all HIV-related deaths that showed complex dynamics unrelated to the war. Depending on the modeling assumptions, the estimated number of deaths over the two years varied from about 46,600 to about 64,100, with 58,500 corresponding to our preferred model. Our estimate should be treated as a lower bound on the true number of deaths because the data do not include either the Russian military personnel missing in action and not officially declared dead or the deaths registered in the Ukrainian territories annexed in 2022.

Adolescent women aged 19 or younger make up a substantial and growing proportion of women of reproductive age in low- and middle-income countries. Several key features of the reproductive life course ground the need to disaggregate the contraceptive behaviors of adolescent women from those of older women, including relationship dynamics, resources and autonomy, and cultural and societal expectations regarding sexual activity and childbearing. Despite the importance and unique life course features of adolescent women, we lack the information about their contraceptive dynamics-especially their patterns of contraceptive discontinuation-needed to direct improvements to family planning programs for this oft-neglected group. We use Demographic and Health Surveys from 55 countries to describe contraceptive dynamics among adolescent women, comparing them with trends among women aged 20-49. We find that adolescent women tended to use reversible, short-acting methods, whereas those later in the reproductive life course tended to use long-acting methods and female sterilization. Across all regions, 12-month all-method discontinuation rates among those who discontinued their method while not wanting to get pregnant ranged from 16.7 to 34.2 discontinuations per person-month for adolescent women and from 12.0 to 28.8 discontinuations per person-month for older women. Side effects and health concerns were a leading discontinuation reason for both age groups in most regions, and infrequent sex and desire to become pregnant were more frequent discontinuation reasons for adolescent women in most regions. Not since 2009 have scholars compared contraceptive discontinuation rates across multiple countries and disaggregated by age. Furthermore, no prior publication has compared specific reasons for discontinuation between adolescent and older women. Understanding the distinct contraceptive dynamics of those earliest in their reproductive life course can help direct policy and programmatic interventions.