There is a substantial body of literature on the subject of fertility decline in Europe during the first demographic transition. Historical demographic research on this topic started in Western Europe, but, as a result of the discussion of the Hajnal line thesis, the decline in fertility has...

In 2007, Germany enacted a radical new parental leave benefit scheme that grants parents 67 percent of their previous income, and includes two “daddy months.” In this paper, we use data from the German Microcensus for the period 1999 to 2009 to explore how this reform has changed fathers’...

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This paper investigates the role of recent pension reforms for the development of the social security system and economic growth in Austria. We use a computable general equilibrium model that is built up of overlapping generations that differ by their household structure, longevity, educational...

This study suggests that outsourcing to service providers is becoming the third edge in the economics of households in the 21st century. By referring to the household as an organizational unit, we use the transaction cost approach of the organizational economists to discuss and conceptualize the...

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...

Statistical analysis of data on the longest living humans leaves room for speculation whether the human force of mortality is actually leveling o®. Based on this uncertainty, we study a mixture failure model, introduced by Finkelstein and Esaulova (2006) that generalizes, among others, the...

This paper gives an overview of fertility data for Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Particular attention is given to the availability of order-specific fertility data. We discuss the quality of data provided by the Statistical Offices, both birth registration data and censuses or microcensuses....

Consistent with inclusive fitness theory, evolutionary biologists predict that individuals care more for their biological than their social children and hence that biological children assess the relationships to their parents better than stepchildren. To test this assumption, we use data from...

This paper examines the effectiveness of the public health education and poverty relief programs prior to the New Deal. Prior researchers have speculated these programs contributed to the declining mortality rates during the 1920s, but have been unable to econometrically estimate their impact...