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...

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...

Adult mortality decline was the driving force of life-expectancy increase in many developed countries in the second half of the twentieth century. In this paper we study one of the most widely used models to capture adult human mortality - the Gompertz proportional hazards model. In its standard...

Statistical analysis of data on the longest living humans leaves room for speculation whether the human force of mortality is actually leveling o®. Based on this uncertainty, we study a mixture failure model, introduced by Finkelstein and Esaulova (2006) that generalizes, among others, the...

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