Population ageing affects most countries, especially developed ones. The elderly have increased in number as a result of increased longevity and a parallel decline in fertility. This phenomenon is placing an increasing burden on the young to finance intergenerational transfers to the old, which...

How do social group boundaries evolve? Does the appearance of a new outgroup change the ingroup's perceptions of other outgroups? We introduce a conceptual framework of context-dependent categorization, in which exposure to one minority leads to recategorization of other minorities as in- or...

How does the arrival of a new minority group affect the social acceptance and outcomes of existing minorities? We study this question in the context of the First Great Migration. Between 1915 and 1930, 1.5 million African Americans moved from the US South to Northern urban centers, which were...

We assess Africa's prospects for enjoying a demographic dividend. While fertility rates and dependency ratios in Africa remain high, they have started to decline. According to UN projections, they will fall further in the coming decades such that by the mid-21st century the ratio of the...

Paul Samuelson made a series of important contributions to population theory for humans and other species, evolutionary theory, and the theory of age structured life cycles in economic equilibrium and growth. The work is highly abstract but much of it was intended to illuminate issues of...

An early age at first marriage is known to be associated with a high risk of divorce. Yet it has been suggested that beyond a certain point, the relationship between age at marriage and marital instability may become positive, because as unmarried women begin to hear their biological clock tick,...

Ever since the very beginning of the Journal of Economics and Statistics, population economics has featured prominently in the Journal. Fertility naturally plays an important role in population economics. Its size has decreased significantly from the 1900s. Long time-series regarding fertility...