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,...

A fundamental reversal of the traditional fertility-development relationship has occurred in highly developed countries so that further socioeconomic development is no longer associated with decreasing fertility, but with increasing fertility. In this paper, we seek to shed light on the...

We examine how family, money, and health explain variation in life satisfaction (“happiness”) over the life cycle. Globally, these factors explain a substantial fraction of happiness, increasing from 12 percent in young adulthood to 15 percent in mature adulthood. Health is the most...

This paper aims at contributing to a proposal for the concept and content of the Contextual Database of the Generations and Gender Program. We develop guidelines for data collection by identifying the main focus, the key dimensions as well as the main data types of the GGP Contextual Database....

The increasing recognition that the study of human behaviors has to take into account the multiple contexts in which they occur has opened a promising research avenue in social sciences. It also presents new challenges, e.g., to complement micro-level surveys with the collection of meaningful...

The old age population in developed countries has been increasing remarkably, yet internationally comparable high quality data on oldest-old mortality remain relatively scarce. The Kannisto-Thatcher Old Age Mortality Database (KTD) is a unique source providing uniformly recalculated old-age...

There is one unique age separating early deaths from late deaths such that averting an early death decreases life disparity, but averting a late death increases inequality in lifespans.