Empirical studies indicate that the transition to parenthood is influenced by an individual's peer group. To study the mechanisms that create interdependencies across individuals' transition to parenthood and its timing we apply an agent-based simulation model. We build a one-sex model and...

The aim of this paper is to analyse the effectivity of family policies in the context of different assumptions regarding the social structure of a society. We use an agent based simulation model to analyse the impact of family policies on individual fertility decisions and on cohort fertility,...

China and India, two Asian countries that experienced a rapid decline in fertility since the middle of the twentieth century, are the focus of this paper. Although there is no doubt that lower fertility levels have many positive effects on the economy, development and sustainability, little is...

This paper investigates the future development of the Austrian population for the period from 2005 to 2035. The main focus of our investigation lies on the working age population and its age structure. Our calculations are based on the population projection released by Statistik Austria in 2005....

This state-of-the-art report discusses the substantive and methodological background for the construction and application of a family-related foresight method. The substantive part includes a brief presentation of two preceding family-oriented foresight methods: one run by the OECD in 2012...

Projecting the religious composition of the population is relevant for several reasons. It is a key characteristic influencing several aspects of individual behaviour, including marriage and childbearing patterns. The religious composition is also a driver of social cohesion and increased...

Religion and religiosity are important identity markers, and changes in a country's religious composition may affect its culture, value orientations and policies. In recent decades the Protestants in both the US and Canada have lost their absolute population majority. In the present study we...

We project the religious composition of the United States to 2043, considering fertility differences, migration, intergenerational religious transmission and conversion by 11 ethnoreligious groups. If fertility and migration trends continue, Hispanic Catholics will experience rapid growth,...

Fertility intentions are the most proximate determinants of actual fertility (e.g., Barber 2001; Bongaarts 1992) and inform us about directional trends (Hin et al. 2011; Testa 2014). They are transmitted across generations from parents to children (Fernandez and Fogli 2006). However, the literature on...

We show that in a large class of distributed optimal control models (DOCM), where population is described by a McKendrick type equation with an endogenous number of newborns, the reproductive value of Fisher shows up as part of the shadow price of the population. Depending on the objective...