Untersuchungen zur Kinderwunschthematik stellen bisher Individualanalysen in den Mittelpunkt, dabei wird der Partnerschaftskontext, in dem Kinder(wünsche) entstehen, vernachlässigt. Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht anhand der Befragung von 2.793 Paaren im Rahmen der „Panel Analysis of...

During the 1920s and early 1930s, fertility in American municipalities declined overall and with large variation between areas and across time. Using data for 1923-1932 on fertility and public spending for over 50 large cities, we show that the local government programs of health education and...

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...

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The notion of ‘patriarchy’ has pervaded the scholarly descriptions of peasant families in historical Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. The term has often included many different elements, such as the dominance of patrilineal descent, patrilocal or patrivirilocal residence after marriage,...

Investigating the effect of mortality shocks on humans is difficult in the absence of laboratory experiments. However, some events in human history serve as natural experiments. Using data for Australian prisoners during WWII and for the Ukrainian Famine in 1933, I analyzed the effect of sudden...

There is a substantial body of literature on the subject of fertility decline in Europe during the first demographic transition. Historical demographic research on this topic started in Western Europe, but, as a result of the discussion of the Hajnal line thesis, the decline in fertility has...

In 2007, Germany enacted a radical new parental leave benefit scheme that grants parents 67 percent of their previous income, and includes two “daddy months.” In this paper, we use data from the German Microcensus for the period 1999 to 2009 to explore how this reform has changed fathers’...

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...