In their contributions to the debate on exceptional longevity, several scholars have noted the existence of spatial hot spots, or areas with a high concentration of individuals who have survived to very high ages (e.g. Sardinia in Italy or Okinawa in Japan). However, most of these studies were...

In this paper we propose a way to measure the degree of government intervention on forward –from parents to children– and backward –from adult children to elderly parents– intergenerational family transfers (IFT). We carry out a discussion about the possibility of using Generational...

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The challenges women face in reconciling their work and family responsibilities are at the heart of current explanations concerning the low fertility levels in developed countries. This study examines the role of the outsourcing of household labor and of childcare responsibilities in reducing...

The transformation of traditional childbearing patterns of early family formation to later family formation characterized recent fertility trends in Russia. These were intrinsically interwoven with fundamental changes in all aspects of life of young people in the 1990s and the 2000s. The past...

Adult lifespan variation in most western countries has stagnated since the 1960s, despite continued improvements in longevity. Cross-sectional analyses, however, find that in the 1990s higher socio-economic position was associated with lower lifespan variation. Trends in this association over...

We examine how family, money, and health explain variation in life satisfaction (“happiness”) over the life cycle. Globally, these factors explain a substantial fraction of happiness, increasing from 12 percent in young adulthood to 15 percent in mature adulthood. Health is the most...

Understanding how the process of childbearing influences parental well-being has great potential to explain variation in fertility. However, most research on fertility and happiness uses cross-sectional data, hindering causal conclusions. We study trajectories of parental happiness before and...

This paper investigates the role of states and regions in shaping spatial patterns of non-marital fertility in Europe since 1960 using a dataset of 497 European subnational regions and smaller countries. Almost all regions registered substantial nonmarital fertility increases over the last 50...

In developing countries, rainfall shocks around the time of birth have been shown decrease later health. The mechanism is unknown, but could run through income shocks, disease exposure, or increasing opportunity cost of parental time which influences parenting behavior. We use the Vietnam...