A Norwegian register analysis with control for time-constant individual characteristics shows an association between cohabitation and declining use of primary health care for mental diseases. However, the decline largely occurs … Read more
Young people’s ability to marry increasingly depends on obtaining housing and forming independent households. Ragui Assaad, Caroline Krafft, and Dominique J. Rolando show how Egypt’s 1996 rent liberalization law reversed … Read more
Challenging claims of disadvantage in same-sex parented families, Jan Kabátek and Francisco Perales find that same-sex-parented children actually outperform their peers in many areas of academic achievement. Over the last … Read more
Giorgio Di Gessa, Paola Zaninotto and Karen Glaser find that, in England, most grandmothers and grandfathers provide grandchild care throughout the year to allow parents to undertake paid work. However, … Read more
Nowhere in Europe is the share of births out of marriage larger than in Iceland. Nevertheless, most Icelanders marry. In this article Ari Klængur Jónsson argues that even though the … Read more
Marriage with the prospect of migration may lead to new patterns of union formation in globalized marriage markets. Annika Elwert looks at characteristics and marriage patterns of majority natives who … Read more
Martin Kolk and Gunnar Andersson study the evolution of same-sex marriages, childbearing and divorce in Sweden. They highlight increases in childbearing and marriage of female couples in particular, and a … Read more
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
Legalizing same-sex marriage is as an important step toward reducing differences in well-being based on sexual orientation. For example, the subjective well-being of individuals in same-sex couples increased following legalizationin … Read more
Heeju Sohn quantifies the diverging kin networks of adults with low and high socioeconomic status (SES) in the United States. In 2013, high SES adults had about 13 years with … Read more
Women tend to adapt to their male spouse when families move. Maria Brandén and Karen Haandrikman examine whether this is also true for the moves couples make when forming a … Read more
Using data from the American Community Survey 2008-2014, Zhenchao Qian and Daniel T. Lichter show how assortative mating patterns are subject to local marriage market conditions.They also find that previously … Read more
Consanguinity has important implications for public health as it increases the risk of passing on autosomal recessive genetic disorders to the next generation. Thus, it is important that we learn … Read more
Starting in the late 1980s, new laws concerning same-sex unions were passed, first in Denmark (registered partnerships in 1989) and the Netherlands (marriage in 2001), and then in several other … Read more
In a recent study (Väisänen 2017), I examined how women make decisions to terminate a pregnancy within the wider context of their lives – including the state and quality of … Read more
Living standards have risen generally, and poverty rates have fallen across Sub-Saharan Africa since the late 1990s (Chen and Ravallion, 2013). Less is known about how different groups have fared.In … Read more
Low fertility levels have become a typical characteristic of industrialised countries where two distinct patterns are observed. A number of countries, especially in southern Europe and East Asia, have persistently … Read more
“What God has put together let no man put asunder”. This biblical quote is frequently heard among Filipinos, particularly among the older generations, to discourage young people from leaving an … Read more
On average, in the United States, men earn more per hour when married than when single, even after adjusting for differences such as age and education. However, despite the suggestive … Read more
In Guatemala, it’s legal for a girl to marry as young as 14 — though many are married far younger than that. The result: Many girls marry men far older … Read more
The mid-20th-century was a Golden Age of marriage in Europe and the United States. People married early, usually in their early-to-mid-20s, and often, with over 90% of people marrying at … Read more
High levels of childlessness may seem typical of individualized modern societies. However, the phenomenon has been widespread throughout human history. From the Early Modern Period, marriage and childbearing were strictly … Read more
The immigrant health effect is a well-known public health fact observed in many advanced economies. Immigrants tend to be healthier than natives, though their health advantage erodes over time.In the … Read more
En 2005, l’Espagne est devenue le troisième pays de l’Union Européenne à légaliser le mariage pour les personnes du même sexe, après les Pays Bas en 2001 et la Belgique … Read more
If at first you don’t succeed … The first union used to be the one that would last “until death do us part”. The transformation in partnership behaviour emerging in … Read more
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
Co-residence between elderly parents and independent, married adult children is a common phenomenon in East Asian societies. For example, according to the 2005 China Inter-Census Survey data, two thirds of … Read more
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
Data from registers that cover entire national populations have been extensively used in demography, other social sciences, and epidemiology over the last three decades.The Nordic countries in particular have very valuable … Read more