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...

The tendency of women to outlive their own fertility has been explained allometrically, with age at reproductive cessation attributed to ovarian follicle depletion in allometrically appropriate ovaries, and longevity related to brain and body scaling. However, because women's age at reproductive...

Females in all mammalian species care for their offspring, while most mammalian males do not. This failure of paternal investment is generally explained in terms of a trade-off between paternal care and mating competition. While there has been great interest in the optimal pattern of investment...

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...