When babies and PhDs collide: a gendered story
Becoming a parent during doctoral training carries lasting career consequences, but not equally for women and men. Xinyi Zhao presents the results of a global study on 8,097 academic parents … Read more
Education
Children’s schooling and living arrangements in 24 African countries
As Maria Pohl, Ewa Batyra and Albert Esteve demonstrate, despite recent progress, differences in school enrolment by children’s living arrangements persist in Africa, driving diversity within and between countries. Children … Read more
How siblings shape cognitive aging. Evidence from American families
Yiang Li’s research on Americans born in the early 20th century shows that adults who grew up with multiple brothers and sisters, especially siblings close in age, experienced markedly faster cognitive … Read more
Your partner’s education shapes your survival
People with higher levels of education tend to live longer, healthier lives. However, education is not only an individual resource – its benefits may also be shared between partners. Using … Read more
The importance of educational expansion for longevity trends
Educational expansion has contributed to increasing the average lifespan and reducing its variability. As Jesús-Daniel Zazueta-Borboa, Ugofilippo Basellini and Fanny Janssen show for England & Wales, Finland, and Italy (Turin) … Read more
A new method for measuring the educational gradient of period fertility in Europe
Angela Greulich and Laurent Toulemon present a new method for measuring the educational gradient of fertility for women who are at childbearing age rather than for women who have already … Read more
Female education and fertility stalls in sub-Saharan Africa
Progress in education has been uneven in sub-Saharan Africa, which may have contributed to slowing or halting fertility decline. Bruno Schoumaker and David A. Sánchez-Páez note that fertility has stalled … Read more
Fertility differentials in the USA: the interplay of ethnicity and education
Black women in the US have higher fertility than White women, but this difference does not emerge consistently at all educational levels. Emma Zang and Aparajita Kaphle document these education-specific … Read more
Educational disparities in partnership formation and dissolution in Finland (1990-2019)
As marriage declines and divorce increases, partnership trends and household composition become increasingly determined by trends in the formation and dissolution of non-marital cohabiting unions. Marika Jalovaara and Linus Andersson … Read more
Differential educational consequences of parental separation in West Germany
Children are not all equally influenced by parental separation. Wiebke Schulz shows that children with parents from a lower educational background have fewer chances of completing mid-secondary education. This is … Read more
Tertiary education and internal migration across Europe
There is a positive association between tertiary education and internal migration across Europe. Miguel González-Leonardo, Aude Bernard, Joan García-Román and Antonio López-Gay find that this holds also for immigrants: they … Read more
Educational consequences of parental divorce and death in Europe
Children and youngsters who experience parental divorce or parental death often attain lower levels of education than their peers, but the impact of these adverse events is far from uniform, … Read more
Educational gender inequality in sub-Saharan Africa: a cohort perspective
Analysing consecutive birth cohorts in 21 sub-Saharan African countries over the 20th century, Joerg Baten, Michiel De Haas, Elisabeth Kempter and Felix Meier zu Selhausen find that gender gaps first … Read more
Does educational mismatch affect labour emigration from Switzerland?
The relationship between educational mismatch in the labour market and emigration decisions is a complex one. In Switzerland, undereducation increases emigration by UE27/EFTA migrants. In contrast, Philippe Wanner, Marco Pecoraro … Read more
Maternal education and infant mortality decline in Indonesia
Better maternal education has been credited with making a major contribution to infant mortality decline. However, previous studies have overestimated the contribution of better maternal education. Using individual-level data from … Read more
Educating children in India may help keep their parents healthy
A strong positive association exists between children’s education and parental health in India. Berenike Thoma and Jan-Walter De Neve explain that this positive relationship persists when controlling for a wide … Read more
Hypergamy on the decline in Europe
As women’s levels of education increasingly overtake those of men, educational hypergamy (male educational advantage in a relationship) is declining throughout Europe, as Dávid Erát shows. Who chooses whom? The … Read more
Accelerating fertility decline through education and family planning
Daphne H. Liu and Adrian E. Raftery find that increasing women’s educational attainment and contraceptive prevalence can have an accelerating effect on fertility decline in high-fertility countries, with a larger … Read more
Migrant children’s schooling in urban China
Massive internal migration in China has led to a rise in the population of migrant children. Yuanfei Li, Zai Liang and Zhongshan Yue examine schooling choices for migrant children in … Read more
Selecting highly educated immigrants may not significantly raise the average education of the U.S. labor force
In the U.S., adopting a Canadian‐style admissions policy, i.e., explicitly selecting immigrants based on educational attainment,would not significantly improve the educational level of the labor force, and the (unlikely) elimination … Read more
Markedly lower child mortality in Malawi and Uganda with more educated mothers
Using data from Demographic and Health Surveys, Liliana Andriano and Christiaan Monden show that, everything else equal, each additional year of maternal schooling reduces children’s probability of dying before age … Read more
Breaking down the increase in non-marital births in Finland
Low-educated persons are especially likely to have their children outside marriage in Finland. While the proportion of people with low education has declined sharply in most countries in recent decades, … Read more
The demographic dividend is driven by education, not changes in age structure
Wolfgang Lutz, Jesus Crespo Cuaresma, and Nicholas Gailey show that the “demographic dividend” does not result from the opening of “a window of opportunity” caused by a declining youth dependency … Read more
Earning their keep? Fostering, education and work in Tanzania
Fostering is common throughout sub-Saharan Africa, but the motivations for fostering and consequences for fostered children remain unclear. In northern Tanzania, Sophie Hedges, Rebecca Sear, Jim Todd, Mark Urassa, and … Read more
Does childrearing affect women’s economic opportunities?
As fertility declines in low- and middle-income countries, the time women devote to childrearing may also be reduced, opening up possibilities for women to pursue educational and employment opportunities. John Bongaarts, … Read more
Persistence and reversals in Nordic fertility
Many studies find that highly educated women have few children and high level of childlessness, but as Marika Jalovaara and colleagues show, the patterns in the Nordic countries have changed … Read more
Education disruptions in the 1980s contributed to the stalled fertility decline in Africa around 2000
Masked by time, educational disruptions of the 1980s help explain why steady fertility declines came to a surprising halt in the 2000s in ten sub-Saharan African countries. The findings, according … Read more
Holding Spanish students back a year: just how effective is it?
Repeating a school year is an ineffective pedagogical practice: it fails to improve the academic performance of those who are held back, and in some cases it may even make … Read more
Does parental separation increase inequality of educational opportunity?
Our research (Bernardi & Boertien 2016a; 2016b) has led us to the conclusion that, while children growing up without one parent in the household do have lower educational attainment,family structure … Read more
How does parental separation affect children’s day-to-day life?
Parental separation increases children’s risk of poverty The proportion of children experiencing parental divorce or separation has increased across Western countries. As a result, in 2014 about 16% of children … Read more
Better education has become a stabilizer of marriages in Taiwan
While divorce is usually lower in Asian than in Western societies, a drastic rise in crude divorce rates has been reported in many East Asian countries in the recent past … Read more
On marriage, happiness, and gender specialization of work
The married are happier and more satisfied with their lives than the unmarried (Verbakel, 2012; Gove et al., 1990). Yet, as divorce and cohabitation increase, we may be facing a … Read more
Growing education-related disparities in length of life in the US
“Time and chance happeneth to them all. For man also knoweth not his time: as the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are … Read more
Does birth order affect earnings? Only temporarily
The sooner (you are born) the better – initially. The existing empirical evidence suggests that the first-born earn a wage premium with respect to the later-born. One reason is better … Read more
Obesity and development – maybe a fit?
Wikipedia informs us that “obesity is a medical condition in which excess body fat has accumulated to the extent that it may have a negative effect on health, leading to … Read more
Allez les filles, au travail!
Freanch version below Two years ago, Neodemos received an article from Valeria SOLESIN, a young student who was then unknown to most demographers, in Italy or elsewhere. She was later … Read more
The population of Sri Lanka in transition: policy stance
The present world population of 7.3 billion is projected to increase to 8.5 billion or more by 2030, with almost 90 percent of the increase occurring in the developing countries, … Read more