Over the last decades numerous studies have dealt with demographic differences between the former communist eastern part of Germany and western Germany. Although the demography of these two regions has converged with respect to mortality and overall fertility levels, non-marital births are the...

This essay represents an attempt at a re-examination of the Western scientific evidence for the existence of the divergent “Eastern European family pattern.” This evidence is challenged by almost entirely unknown contributions of Eastern European scholars, revealing the stark incompatibility...

The view of Eastern Europe as a locus of complex family organisation and familistic societal values has reached the status of general dogma in Western social sciences and demography. By offering an overview of almost entirely unknown scholarly achievements of Eastern Europeanists, this essay...

It has been argued recently that a society’s ‘gender system’ influences parents’ sex preferences for children. If this was true, one should expect to find no evidence of such preferences in countries with a high level of gender equality. In this paper we exploit population register data...

This paper examines the development of female and maternal labor market participation in western Germany. We discuss major forces that contribute to educational differences in female employment behavior. The empirical investigation draws on data from the scientific-use-files of the...

Dieser Beitrag beschäftigt sich mit der Geburtenentwicklung in den nordischen Ländern seit den 1970er Jahren und den Wirkungen familienpolitischer Maßnahmen auf die Fertilitätsentwicklung. Basis der Analysen bilden Auswertungen harmonisierter Registerdaten Dänemarks, Finnlands, Norwegens...

In this paper we investigate the changing impact of union formation on the transition to parenthood in West Germany and Italy using FFS data. We first draw attention to overall cohort patterns in union formation and first births and then describe the mutual relationships between union formation,...

This paper investigates the role of female earnings in childbearing decisions in two very different European contexts. By applying event history techniques to German and Danish register data during 1981-2001, we demonstrate how female earnings relate to first, second and third birth rates. Our...

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Forecasting the population of Poland is very challenging. Firstly, the country has been undergoing rapid demographic changes. In the 1990s, Poland experienced a fundamental shift from a communist regime to a democratic regime and entered the European Union in 2004. The political, economic, and...