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...

There are already several documented examples of recent increases in cohort fertility in Scandinavia, but for most countries, cohorts are too young to see if cohort fertility has increased. We produce new estimates of completed cohort fertility for cohorts born in the 1970s. We combine the best...

The 1970s worries of the "population bomb" were replaced in the 1990s with concerns of population aging driven by falling birth rates. Across the developed world, the nearly universally-used fertility indicator, the period total fertility rate, fell well below two children per woman. However,...

In this paper, I re-introduce the Gompertz model of age-specific fertility. This model has been rejected by past authors as fitting poorly to cross-sectional, or period rates. However, I find that the model fits very well to recent medium and low fertility cohort schedules in France, Italy, and...

This paper shows new evidence of a steady long-term decline in age of male sexual maturity since at least the mid-eighteenth century. A method for measuring the timing of male maturity is developed based on the age at which male young adult mortality accelerates. The method is applied to...

Some 20 years after unification, the contrast between East and West Germany provides a unique natural experiment for studying the persistence of communist-era family patterns, the effects of economic change, and the complexities of the process of fertility postponement. After unification,...

This paper investigates whether there has been a fundamental change in the importance of economic conditions on fertility. Through the 1980s econometric studies had found at best a mixed, neutral or negative effect of economic conditions on fertility. Notably, Butz and Ward (1979) concluded that...

Mortality decline has historically been a result of reductions in the level of mortality at all ages. The slope of mortality increase with age has been remarkably stable. A number of leading researchers on aging, however, suggest that the next revolution of longevity increase will be the result...

We study prediction and error propagation in Hernes, Gompertz, and logistic models for innovation diffusion. We develop a unifying framework in which the models are linearized with respect to cohort age and predictions are derived from the underlying linear process. We develop and compare...

In this paper, we re-introduce geography into the analysis of fertility decline in the first demographic transition in Europe. We reanalyze Galloway et al.'s (1994) Prussian data, fitting structural models similar to those of Galloway et al. to the data and to map the residuals. Our findings...