Increasing proportions of couples are making childbearing decisions in stepfamilies but there has been no general comparative picture across European countries on stepfamily formation. The present paper aims to fill this gap and provides a comparison of European countries using macro-level...

Using data from Germany, we examine if month of birth influences survival up to age 105. Since age reporting at the highest ages is notoriously unreliable we draw on age-validated information from a huge age validation project of 1487 alleged German semi-supercentenarians aged 105+. We use month...

-

-

We present an analysis of birth seasonality in nine geographical regions within Austria for two time periods, 1881-1912 and 1947-1959. In the early period, geography, climate, and agricultural patterns were related to birth seasonality. By the later time period, these factors were no longer...

The standardised rate of third births declined by over 50 percent in Austria between the late 1970s and the mid-1990s. The third birth was also postponed gradually over the years up through 1991-92, after which the tempo of childbearing suddenly increased in response to a change in the...

We present an agent-based model designed to study the cultural evolution of age-at-marriage norms. We review theoretical arguments and empirical evidence on the existence of norms proscribing marriage outside of an acceptable age interval. Using a definition of norms as constraints built in...

Due to its manifold impact on the environment private car use represents an important dimension of en-vironmental behaviour in industrialized countries. Obviously, private car use is related to demographic characteris-tics of households such as the life-cycle stage and the living arrangement the...

Industrialization allowed the industrialized world of today to escape from a regime characterized by low economic and population growth and to enter a regime of hihg economic and population growth. To explain this transion of regime, we construct a two-sector growth model with endogenous...

We present an extension of the Lee-Carter method of modeling mortality to examine structural shifts in trajectories of mortality. Austrian data consisting of 53 years of single-age mortality rates are subdivided into 30 24-year submatrices. Using singular value decomposition, the submatrices are...