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...

Patterns of diversity in age at death are examined using e†, a dispersion measure that also equals the average expected lifetime lost at death. We apply two methods for decomposing differences in e†. The first method estimates the contributions of average levels of mortality and mortality...

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Maternity leave policies are designed to ease the tension between women’s employment and fertility, but whether they actually play such a role remains unclear. We analyze the individual-level effects of maternity leave on employment outcomes and on second conception rates among Russian...

This paper is concerned with sensitivity analysis of life disparity with respect to changes in mortality rates. Recently Zhang and Vaupel introduced a ”threshold age”, such that averting deaths before that age reduces disparity, while averting deaths after that age increases disparity. We...