Family policies aim to influence fertility and labor force participation, and support families. However, often only fertility and labor supply are considered in policy evaluations. For example, the 2007 extension of parental leave benefits in Germany is generally considered unsuccessful because...

Background: Epigenetic inheritance is a potentially important determinant of health in several mammals. For humans, the existing evidence is weak. We investigate whether disease exposure triggers functional epigenetic inheritance among humans by analyzing siblings who were conceived under...

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...

Objective: Epigenetic inheritance has been suggested to be an important factor influencing mortality. We use historical Québec data (years 1670-1759) to study whether parents modify epigenetically their offspring’s phenotype prior to conception in response to predicted/perceived mortality. If...