This paper assesses inequality in longevity across education and gender groups in 23 OECD countries around 2011. Data on mortality rates by age, gender, educational attainment, and, for 17 countries, cause of death were collected from national sources, with similar treatment applied to all countries in order to derive comparable measures of longevity at age 25 and 65 by gender and education. These estimates show that, on average, the gap in life expectancy between high and low-educated people is 7.6 years for men and 4.8 years for women at age 25 years, and 3.6 years for men and 2.6 years for women at age 65. At the age of 25, the gap in life expectancy between high and low-educated people varies between 4.1 years (in Canada) and 13.9 years (in Hungary) for men, and between 2.5 years (in Italy) and 8.3 years (in Latvia) for women; in the United States, the gap is 10.0 years for men and 7.0 years for women. Cardiovascular diseases are the first cause of death for all gender and education groups after age 65 years, and the first cause of mortality inequality between the high and low-education elderly.

The configurational studies of this special issue trace complex patterns of interdependencies existing among family members and beyond households. They focus on the functional connections among spouses, children, siblings, and other relatives living in a variety of households. The main goal of this special issue is to reveal how some key decisions and exchanges occurring in family dyads, such as the marital and parent–child dyads, are embedded within a larger set of family and interpersonal exchanges that constitute configurations of their own in a variety of contexts.

This paper contributes to the migration literature studying the time devoted to educational activities. It uses US time-diary surveys to study the allocation of time to informal as well as formal learning and educational activities by immigrants and natives. We develop a simple theoretical framework, which highlights the different constraints/opportunity costs faced by immigrants as compared with natives. Consistently with our theoretical model, the estimates show that immigrants are more likely to engage in informal and formal education and conditional on participation, they allocate more time to these activities. We find that the main drivers are economic incentives, mostly in the early phase of working life, and that the differences between natives and immigrants persist across generations. We also find that differences between immigrants and natives are generally larger in informal education than in formal education. The investment in informal and formal learning and educational activities is likely to boost immigrants' human and social capital and contribute to their socio-economic integration.

On average, childless women observed by the Panel Study of Income Dynamics report that they intend to have more children than they actually have. A collection of intentions that record only whether respondents intend to have another child can more accurately predict the number of children they have. Errors in the formation of intentions are not required to explain this finding. Rather, if intentions record a survey respondent's most likely predicted number of children, then the average of these intentions does not necessarily equal average actual fertility, even if intentions are formed using rational expectations.

Most research on financial inter vivos transfers from older parents to their family members is focused on the giver–receiver dyad, usually between an older parent and an adult child. This study aimed to investigate older adults' financial support beyond this level of intergenerational dyads using an egocentric network perspective (i.e., the configurational approach). Data were from a sample of 2,991 older adults (aged 65 and older) from the Vivre/Leben/Vivere study, a large survey addressing family life and health conditions of older people in Switzerland. We used Wald tests and regression analyses to identify how financial transfers are related to family network properties in later life. Findings showed that older parents' propensity to provide financial support is associated with the density of practical help exchanges within the family (mainly for men) and with the position (mainly for women) and the role they play within their family configuration.

The availability of child-care services has often been advocated as one of the instruments to counter the fertility decline observed in many high-income countries. In the recent past, large inflows of low-skilled migrants have substantially increased the supply of child-care services. In this paper, we examine if immigration has actually affected fertility exploiting the natural experiment occurred in Italy in 2007, when a large inflow of migrants—many of them specialized in the supply of child care—arrived unexpectedly. With a difference-in-differences method, we show that immigrant female workers have increased native births by a number that ranges roughly from 2% to 4%. We validate our result by the implementation of an instrumental variable approach and several robustness tests, all concluding that the increase in the supply of child-care services by immigrant women has positively affected native fertility.

Advanced economies undergo three transitions during their development: (1) transition from a rural to an urban economy, (2) transition from low-income growth to high-income growth, (3) transition from high fertility and mortality rates to low modern levels. The timings of these transitions are correlated in the historical development of most advanced economies. I consider a nonlinear model of endogenous long-run economic and demographic change, in which child quantity-quality substitution is driven by declining child mortality. Because the model captures the interactions between all three transitions, it is able to explain three additional empirical patterns: a declining urban-rural wage gap, a declining rural-urban family size ratio, and most surprisingly, that early urbanization slows development. This third prediction distinguishes the model from other theories of long-run growth, and I document evidence for it in cross-country data.

This paper argues that the expectation of having to provide care for aging parents in the future may be a major factor contributing to the current low fertility rate in Japan. Using data from the 1998 and 2008 National Family Research of Japan (NFRJ) surveys and a Poisson-logit hurdle model, this paper examines whether the expectation of having to look after parents in the future affects a couple's current family planning. The first-stage model of a couple's family planning decision is a logit model which examines the decision of whether or not to have any children, and then in the second stage a Poisson model is applied to explain the number of children a couple has conditional on the couple having at least one child. The empirical evidence presented suggests that there are strong generational effects, and that for the post-war cohort, an increase in the probability of having to look after a parent increases the probability of a couple being childless.

Tolerance of sexual minorities is presumed to matter, but its effects are under-studied. Because tolerance can affect both experiences at work and division of labor in the household, we study the relationship between tolerance and the time cohabiting gay men and lesbian women spend in paid work across the United States. In the average state, the increase in tolerance between 2003 and 2015 is associated with an increase in paid work of about 1 week per year among cohabiting gay men. Though not robustly statistically significant, the increase in tolerance is associated with a decrease in paid work among cohabiting lesbian women relative to heterosexual women.

This study aims to determine the role played by the personal networks of mothers aged 25–40 in Bamako (Mali) in their recourse to prenatal care. Although education and household's economic situation remain important, our research shows that personal network matters in two ways. Prenatal follow-up is more adequate in small, dense, less centralized networks, a structure known to generating a higher level of bonding social capital and mutual support. Yet, the composition of networks is also important: those comprising the husband and neighbors/friends—without other family members—are associated with better prenatal care. In these more open networks, women are probably less subject to traditional social control. An unexpected outcome is that material support does not play a significative role; this may indicate that more specific measures are needed to identify the type of support useful, or that, in this context, normative aspects are more important.

In this study, we produce a valid and consistent variable for socioeconomic status (SES) at the household level with census microdata from ten developing countries available from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series—International (IPUMS-I), the world's largest census database. We use principal components analysis to compute a wealth index based on asset ownership, utilities, and dwelling characteristics. We validate the index by verifying socioeconomic gradients on school enrollment and educational attainment. Given that the availability of socioeconomic indicators varies considerably across samples of census microdata, we implement a stepwise elimination procedure on the wealth index to identify the conditions that produce an internally consistent index. Using the results of the stepwise methodology, we propose which indicators are most important in measuring household SES. The development of the asset index for such a large archive of international census microdata is a very useful public resource for researchers.

Labor market conditions in Greece have severely deteriorated during the crisis, affecting youths the most. Using the Greek crisis as a case-study, this paper examines the role of the family as a social safety net for its young members. Specifically, we test the relationship between youth labor outcomes and parental co-residence, whether this relationship has become stronger during the crisis, and the degree to which the relationship is causal. Our results confirm that the parental home is a refuge both for jobless youth and for those in poorly paid, insecure jobs, and this role has intensified during the crisis. We find no reverse causality between co-residence and employment status for young men, and significant reverse causality for women. This finding implies that all youths live in the parental home when they are in need themselves, but it is young women not men who live with parents when parents are in need or for cultural reasons.

The twentieth century has seen a phenomenal decline in mortality and an increase in productivity level. These two important events likely affect people's choices of schooling years and retirement age. We first show that in a standard life-cycle model, positive feedback exists between optimal schooling years and retirement age choices. We then evaluate the impact of a mortality or productivity shock on an endogenous variable (schooling years or retirement age) by decomposing it into the direct and indirect effects, where the indirect effect arises from feedback from the other endogenous variable. Finally, we extend the model by including the utility benefit of schooling and show that a negative correlation of schooling years and retirement age is possible. Apart from clarifying the apparently similar concepts of positive co-movement and positive feedback, our results have implications relevant to the economic demography literature.

As exchanges of instrumental support between kin and non-kin remain essential to buffer the impact of critical life events, we consider the characteristics of personal configurations that may enhance or hinder them. Personal configurations vary in terms of their composition and two aspects of their structure: density and centrality. These dimensions are investigated to uncover whether they influence the type of instrumental support being exchanged (financial, material, and care) and the likelihood of their being reciprocal. Drawing on a representative sample of individuals living in Switzerland, results show that overall instrumental support is present in all personal configurations irrespective of their composition, but financial support is more prevalent in configurations based on parent–adult child relationships. Furthermore, configuration structures characterized by density of emotional support are positively associated with giving care support and with reciprocity, while those characterized by density of conflict are associated with giving less instrumental support overall.

This paper uses Socio-Economic Surveys covering the period from 2013 to 2019 and the 2015 Time Use Survey to investigate the extent to which household consumption changes at retirement in Thailand. A fuzzy regression discontinuity design is applied to evaluate the retirement effect on total household expenditure and expenditures on four major categories: food-at-home, work-related items, non-durable entertainment, and others. The results reveal that retirement decreases household expenditure by 11%. Further investigations show that the dramatic declines in expenditures on work-related and non-durable entertainment contribute significantly to the spending drop at retirement. The magnitudes of the declines are more pronounced for low-income and low-wealth households. The results also indicate that the retirees spend more leisure time on home production activities after retirement. Once accounting for this effect, it finds that the drop in total household expenditure decreases to 6%. These results suggest that the sizable consumption expenditure drop at retirement is due to substituting away from market purchased goods toward home-produced goods.

While the relationship between socioeconomic status and child health has been studied extensively in developed countries, evidence is limited for developing countries. This study makes an important contribution by examining the relationship between child health and household socioeconomic status in Vietnam, using household expenditure as an alternative measure. This also allows us to explore the mechanisms via which income affects child health, in which household consumption arguably plays a crucial role. We employ different measures of health that allow us to examine both long-run and short-run effects, and two alternative instrumental variables, the unemployment rate and rainfall deviation, to address the potential endogeneity of household expenditure. We find evidence of a strong positive impact of household expenditure on child health and the findings are consistent across age groups. Specifically, a 10% increase in expenditure will result in a weight gain of 213–541 g in a “typical” child. We also explore the effect of a range of exogenous adverse economic shocks on children's health.

Family solidarities remain strong in African societies. In Ouagadougou, transfers within extended family networks provide an omnipresent means for coping with life's difficulties, and the desired number of children remains relatively high. The role of family networks in maintaining high fertility is rarely studied however for lack of data in conventional demographic surveys. This study uses original retrospective data and logistic regression methods to explore the role of the extended family's social capital in shaping women's desire for children in Ouagadougou. Results show that women belong to three types of family networks: (1) women who belong to large family networks on both her own and her husband's side and who maintain a moderate number of close relations with their own relatives; (2) women who also belong to large family networks on both their and their husband's sides but who maintain a greater number of close relations with their own blood relatives; (3) unmarried women with relatives only on their side and numerous close relations with their family. Support for children's schooling comes more often from women's relatives in networks type 2 and 3, and from husbands' relatives in network type 1. Support for children's schooling increases with the level of economic resources in family networks (proxied by the presence of a public employee), in all network types. Women in type 2 networks (centered on women's relatives) are more likely to want additional children compared to women in type 1 networks (centered on their husband's relatives), after controlling for economic resources in networks. This result suggests that practical support provided by family members could play a role, on top of economic support, in encouraging high fertility in Ouagadougou.

Knowledge of the long relationship between gender equality and economic growth is hampered by the lack of information and resources on the various dimensions of gender equality. This paper is a first attempt to assess the size of the gender gap and investigate its relationship with economic growth from a historical perspective. Exploiting a unique census-based dataset of 86 French counties in the mid-nineteenth century, I construct a historical gender gap index measuring the size of the gap between men and women in three critical areas: economic opportunities, educational attainment, and health. A county comparison allows me to identify the strengths and weaknesses of French counties in closing the gender gap. I find that France can be divided into two main areas, the North and the South. In particular, the Northern counties that have done most to narrow the gap display better economic performance. Boys' and girls' education and family structures appear to be crucial determinants of gender equality. Gender equality is positively and significantly associated with economic performance. Accounting for the multi-dimensions of gender equality is crucial for economic development.