The economic stress hypothesis (ESH) suggests that economic decline leads to a decrease in the proportion of males born in a population. A multitude of additional influences on sex ratios that often cannot be accounted for empirically make assessing the validity of the ESH difficult. Thus, as a...

Several countries in Northern and Western Europe report cohort fertility rates of close to two children per woman, including Belgium, France, and Denmark. By contrast, most Central and Southern European countries have cohort fertility levels of only around 1.5-1.6 children. Germany is part of...

Die Untersuchung der Sterblichkeit der sozialversicherungspflichtigen Beschäftigten des Jahres 2004 deckt die Gründe für die Unterschiede der Lebenserwartung bei Männern im Ost-West-Vergleich auf. Es wird gezeigt, dass die bestehenden strukturellen Unterschiede des Arbeitsmarktes in Ost- und...

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There is a growing body of literature that looks at the causes of below-replacement fertility in developed countries. While the variation in childbearing patterns across countries and between socio-economic groups within a country has been studied in detail, little is known about the differences...

Previous analyses of period fertility suggest that the trends of the Nordic countries are sufficiently similar to speak of a common "Nordic fertility regime". We investigate whether this assumption can be corroborated by comparing cohort fertility patterns in the Nordic countries. We study...

The aim of our paper is to provide an answer to the questions if and why social differences in health and mortality decrease with age. Most research confirms this decrease but the reasons for it and the role of unobserved heterogeneity are unknown. The data used for our analysis come from the US...

This paper examines the relationship between work and family among men in western Germany. We investigate the extent to which a difficult start in and insecurities during the working life affect men’s transition to fatherhood, and the degree to which this effect is influenced by...

This paper investigates the impact of immigration on the transition to motherhood among women from Turkey, Italy, Spain, Greece, and the former Yugoslavia in West Germany. We apply a hazard regression analysis to data of the German Socio-Economic Panel study. We distinguish between the first and...

This paper compares the non-marital birth pattern in France and West Germany. Since the beginning of the eighties, France witnessed a steady increase in non-marital birth rates, while in West Germany non-marital birth rates have remained at a relatively low level. We attribute these differences...