Background: After the reunification of Germany, mortality among older eastern Germans converged quickly with western German levels. Simultaneously, the pension benefits of eastern Germans rose tenfold. Objective: We make use of German reunification as a natural experiment to show that, first,...

Population aging is an inevitable global demographic process. Most of the literature on the consequences of demographic change focuses on the economic and societal challenges that we will face as people live longer and have fewer children. In this paper, we (a) describe key trends and...

Anthropological demography is a specialty within demography which uses anthropological theory and methods to provide a better understanding of demographic phenomena in current and past populations. Its genesis and ongoing growth lie at the intersection between demography and socio-cultural...

The deep drop of the fertility rate in Italy to among the lowest in the world challenges contemporary theories of childbearing and family building. Among high-income countries, Italy was presumed to have characteristics of family values and female labor force participation that would favor...

In this paper, a multilevel approach is used to investigate whether and how regional social contexts influence first and second birth probabilities of women living in western Germany during the 1980s and 1990s. In the theoretical part it is argued that regional opportunity structures as well as...

This study contributes to the understanding of the low level of non-marital cohabitations in Poland at the beginning of the XXI century. We employ interpretative analysis of semi-structured interviews in order to capture the meanings and attitudes associated to non-marital cohabitation by a...

In the paper we outline two possible theoretical interpretations for the inconsistency often observed between fertility intentions and fertility behaviour. We draw on socio-psychological models of human behaviour which emphasise the role of normative-affective factors on decision-making...