Burn-in is a widely used engineering method which is adopted to eliminate defective items before they are shipped to customers or put into the field operation. In the studies of burn-in, the assumption of bathtub shaped failure rate function is usually employed and optimal burn-in procedures are...

This study is informed by competing perspectives on family behaviour in periods of turbulent social change, and intends to provide some fresh insights into the effect of macro-level changes on micro-level processes involving the family. In this pilot study, we take our first step towards...

Period fertility rates fell to previously unseen low levels in a large number of countries beginning in the early 1990s. The persistence of Total Fertility Rates under 1.3 raised the possibility of dramatic, rapid population aging as well as population decline. In an analysis of recent trends,...

Mixtures of distributions are usually effectively used for modeling heterogeneity. It is well known that mixtures of DFR distributions are always DFR. On the other hand, mixtures of IFR distributions can decrease, at least in some intervals of time. As IFR distributions often model lifetimes...

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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The political discourse on demographic change has gained momentum in many developed countries. When it began, the discussion centred on the question of how to influence population ageing through political means (e.g., by raising fertility rates). But political decision makers now seem to be...

For studying both individual-level and small-scale contextual influences on the effects of family policies on fertility, Multilevel Event History methods are the state-of-the-art. But in many countries, these methods cannot be applied because the available individual-level data are inadequate....

Adult mortality decline was the driving force of life-expectancy increase in many developed countries in the second half of the twentieth century. In this paper we study one of the most widely used models to capture adult human mortality - the Gompertz proportional hazards model. In its standard...

This paper examines the relationship between home-leaving intensities of young adults and the rapid social, economic, and demographic changes that took place in post-World War II Japan. By using event-history modeling, the study shows that the declines in sibling numbers and in rural residence...