This paper is motivated by the theory that developmental idealism has been disseminated globally and has become an important international force for family and demographic change. Developmental idealism is a set of cultural beliefs and values about development and how development relates to...

OBJECTIVE<br> I develop and explain a new method for interpolating detailed fertility schedules from age-group data. The method allows estimation of fertility rates over a fine grid of ages, from either standard or non-standard age groups. Users can calculate detailed schedules directly from the...

Background: Epigenetic inheritance is a potentially important determinant of health in several mammals. For humans, the existing evidence is weak. We investigate whether disease exposure triggers functional epigenetic inheritance among humans by analyzing siblings who were conceived under...

Background: After the reunification of Germany, mortality among older eastern Germans converged quickly with western German levels. Simultaneously, the pension benefits of eastern Germans rose tenfold. Objective: We make use of German reunification as a natural experiment to show that, first,...

While regional mortality inequalities in Germany tend to be relatively stable in the short run, over the course of the past century marked changes have occurred in the country’s regional mortality patterns. These changes include not only the re-emergence of stark differences between eastern...

Since the unification of Germany in 1990, the former communist eastern part of the country has experienced substantial levels of population decline and outmigration. These trends are largely attributable to East-West differences in economic development (May 2007). In this article, we explore the...

Population aging is an inevitable global demographic process. Most of the literature on the consequences of demographic change focuses on the economic and societal challenges that we will face as people live longer and have fewer children. In this paper, we (a) describe key trends and...