This paper examines causality and parameter instability in the long-run relationship between fertility and women’s employment. This is done by a cross-national comparison of macro-level time series data from 1960–2000 for France, West Germany, Italy, Sweden, the UK, and the USA. By applying...

-

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...

-

This paper explores the implications of possible bias cancellation using Rubin-style matching methods with complete and incomplete data. After reviewing the naïve causal estimator and the approaches of Heckman and Rubin to the causal estimation problem, we show how missing data can complicate...

Several authors (e.g., Brüderl, Diekmann, Yamaguchi) derive hazard rate models of event history analysis from social diffusion processes. This paper also focuses on the integration of diffusion research and survival analysis. After a discussion of Diekmann's flexible diffusion model, we present...

The intergenerational transmission of the risk of divorce is a well-known long-term effect of divorce that has been found in many Western societies. Less known is the extent to which different family policies and divorce laws have an effect on the intergenerational transmission of divorce. In...

We investigate the hypothesis that the propensity of a stepfamily couple to have a shared child is inversely related to the responsibility for rearing pre-union children. We compare effects of coresident pre-union children to those of nonresident, and effects of the woman’s children to those...

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...