Even in present-day high-income countries, there is a lot of evidence of a high degree of vulnerability of the population to both high and low outdoor temperatures. The magnitude of temperature-related mortality is strongly related to a wide variety of social, economic, and behavioural factors....

According to the classic demographic transition theory, mortality change was the key factor triggering the decline of fertility. In a recent paper Reher and Sanz-Gimeno studied the mechanisms which played a role in this process with individual longitudinal data for the Spanish town of Aranjuez....