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BACKGROUND: There is a long-standing debate about the role of spacing and stopping in the fertility transition, fueled by a lack of METHODS: to appropriately model spacing and stopping. Traditional event-history analysis cannot distinguish between the two processes in analyzing the determinants of birth risks, and attempts to separately model spacing and stopping have been criticized from a methodological point of view. OBJECTIVE: Our aim is to assess the role of spacing and stopping in the historic fertility transition generally, and the role of social-class differences in the fertility decline more specifically. METHODS: We use cure models, which are extensions of traditional survival analysis, to distinguish the impact of stopping and spacing on fertility. The models are applied to individual-level data for a region in southern Sweden between 1813 and 1967. RESULTS: Both spacing and stopping played a role in the fertility transition, but stopping emerged earlier for all parities after the first and had a greater effect on the reduction in fertility. Higher social classes were forerunners in the fertility transition but we do not find that spacing and stopping operated in different ways by social class. CONCLUSION:S Our findings indicate that stopping had an earlier and more substantial impact on the fertility transition than spacing. However, the patterns of the two behaviors were very similar between social classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND: Previous studies have identified a link between religious affiliation and child mortality, yet the underlying factors that contributed to this association are not fully understood. OBJECTIVE: This study investigates how religious affiliation impacted child mortality in early 20th century Ireland, controlling for socioeconomic status, literacy, and place of residence at both the individual and contextual level. METHODS: We utilize the 1911 IPUMS Irish census, indirect techniques, and regression analysis to examine the role of religious affiliation in child mortality. We therefore perform various OLS regressions, controlling for demographic factors and socioeconomic conditions at both the individual and contextual level, as well as for the three major religious groups. RESULTS: Our results indicate striking differences in child mortality rates among the three major religious denominations in Ireland in the early 20th century. Catholics recorded the highest child mortality rates, followed by Church of Ireland families, while Presbyterians experienced the best child mortality outcomes. These differences are explained in part by the varying socioeconomic characteristics of each religious group, but religious affiliation is also shown to have mattered. For reasons that are not altogether clear, Jewish communities had lower child mortality rates than the major religious denominations. CONCLUSIONS: Our study highlights the complex interplay between religious affiliation, socioeconomic factors, and child mortality in Ireland in the early 1900s. Our findings reveal a significant association between religious affiliation and child mortality, which persists even after controlling for certain individual socioeconomic characteristics and contextual factors. CONTRIBUTION: By utilising the 1911 Irish census data and indirect estimation techniques, the study provides a new perspective on child mortality and its relationship with diverse religious affiliations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ireland is often seen as an outlier within the western world in terms of demographic behavior. As a society it has also been noted for its religious fervor, including religious division, at least until fairly recently. Might there be connections historically between these two spheres? One intriguing area of enquiry relates to possible links between religious denomination and child mortality. We explore this possibility using individual-level data from the household schedules of the Irish Census of 1911. The study area is Belfast, Ireland's leading industrial city, which allows for a wide range of occupational and social class differences. Combining regression techniques and the mortality index proposed by Preston and Haines (1991), we seek to tease out the relationship between child mortality and religious affiliation while controlling for a range of other explanatory variables. We show that religious identity is clearly associated with different infant and child mortality outcomes. Of the three major religious denominations, Catholics suffered the most from high infant mortality, Church of Ireland (Anglican) families were only a little better off, while the largest Protestant denomination, the Presbyterians, had the best infant mortality outcomes. These differences were related, in the main, to the varying socioeconomic composition of the three major religious denominations but religious affiliation also mattered in its own right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The object of this work is to examine the specific demographic profile of the Piedmont region in Northern Italy, embracing a long period from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. The approach of this study is basically based on macro serial data and aggregative methods. These data largely comprise census information and parish series of baptisms and burials and are used to estimate the regional population’s size and the main fertility and survival trends. The analysis covers a crucial and critical period from the last catastrophic cycle of the seventeenth-century plague to the beginning of the Italian demographic transition in the late nineteenth century. As a general conclusion, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Piedmont was characterized by a «high-pressure» demographic regime, with high birth and death rates, and a critical sensitivity to short-term economic crises. The study also shows the coexistence of different territorial patterns in the regional demographic evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND The historical demography literature has a longstanding interest in establishing a connection between human body development and the living conditions experienced during infancy and childhood. Empirical research on such matters increasingly relies on survival indicators rather than classical economic measures of living standards, as the former are more directly linked to nutritional quality, material well-being levels, and technological development. OBJECTIVE We explore the relationship between epidemiological conditions and male adult height variation in Italy to understand if and to what extent progress in survival impacted human body evolution during the epidemiological transition. METHODS By exploiting the national military archive data from the Italian National Institute of Statistics and the Human Mortality Database, we focus on conscript cohorts born between 1872 and 1980 to connect average male height at the recruitment age with the prevailing infant and general survival conditions in the calendar year of conscripts' birth. We adopt an econometric approach based on cointegration analysis to study both the long- and the short-run relationships between the time series of interest. RESULTS Error correction model estimates find a positive link between epidemiological condition development and the secular increase in male height in Italy. CONTRIBUTION In the long run, as the probability of survival at the first birthday and life expectancy at 5 years increase, so does average male height. In the short term, however, we find an estimated inverse relationship between survival and stature, which we interpret as a counterintuitive mechanism of negative selection in the survival of the most fragile individuals both among infants and the general population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the short-term relationships between sex ratio at birth and late fetal mortality in Italy from 1910 to 2016. As the leading scholars' attention traditionally focused on long-term trends and variations in the sex ratios at birth among different populations, less interest regarded short-term fluctuations as they were mainly seen as an effect of random variability. We detrended the national series of males proportion among live births and stillbirths by their medium-term component to consider the annual deviations from a normal trend. After controlling for fertility tendencies and wars effects, regression models seem to show the effects of stillbirth on the proportion of male newborns. A sensitivity analysis was also carried out to assess the effects of the perinatal deaths on the proportion of males at birth, combining stillbirths and early neonatal losses to control the possible misspecification between stillborn infants and early neonatal deaths. The significance of late fetal mortality reflects the mortality excess among male fetuses during the intrauterine life, showing evidence for the in utero hypothesis selection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The societal integration of immigrants is a great concern in many of today's Western societies, and has been so for a long time. Whether we look at Europe in 2015 or the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, large flows of immigrants pose challenges to receiving societies. While much research has focused on the socioeconomic integration of immigrants there has been less interest in their demographic integration, even though this can tell us as much about the way immigrants fare in their new home country. In this article we study the disparities in infant and child mortality across nativity groups and generations, using new, high-density census data. In addition to describing differentials and trends in child mortality among 14 immigrant groups relative to the native-born white population of native parentage, we focus special attention on the association between child mortality, immigrant assimilation, and the community-level context of where immigrants lived. Our findings indicate substantial nativity differences in child mortality, but also that factors related to the societal integration of immigrants explains a substantial part of these differentials. Our results also point to the importance of spatial patterns and contextual variables in understanding nativity differentials in child mortality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most studies on the fertility transition have focused either on macro-level trends or on micro-level patterns with limited geographic scope. Much less attention has been given to the interplay between individual characteristics and contextual conditions, including geographic location. Here we investigate the relevance of geography and socioeconomic status for understanding fertility variation in the initial phase of the Swedish fertility transition. We conduct spatially sensitive multilevel analyses on full-count individual-level census data. Our results show that the elite constituted the vanguard group in the fertility decline and that the shift in fertility behavior occurred quickly among them in virtually all parts of Sweden. Other socioeconomic status groups experienced the decline with some delay, and their decline patterns were more clustered around early centers of the decline. Long-distance migrants initially had higher fertility than people living close to their birthplace. However, as the fertility decline unfolded, this advantage was either reduced or reversed. This supports the view that migration and fertility are linked in this process. Our results confirm that socioeconomic status differences were of considerable relevance in structuring the fertility transition. The degree to which spatial distance fostered spatial variation in the fertility decline seems to have been negatively correlated with socioeconomic status, with the pattern of decline among the elite showing the lowest degree of spatial variation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although intermarriage is a common indicator of immigrant integration into host societies, most research has focused on how individual characteristics determine intermarriage. This study uses the 1910 ipums census sample to analyze how contextual factors affected intermarriage among European immigrants in the United States. Newly available, complete-count census microdata permit the construction of contextual measures at a much lower level of aggregation—the county—in this analysis than in previous studies. Our results confirm most findings in previous research relating to individual-level variables but also find important associations between contextual factors and marital outcomes. The relative size and sex ratio of an origin group, ethnic diversity, the share of the native-born white population, and the proportion of life that immigrants spent in the United State are all associated with exogamy. These patterns are highly similar across genders and immigrant generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies contextual effects on fertility at the onset of fertility decline in Sweden. We argue that the community exerts an influence on fertility when individuals belonging to a certain community are more similar to one another (within-area) in their reproductive behaviour than individuals living in another community (between-area). Our hypotheses are that community had a strong influence in the past but that it decreased over time as more individualistic values grew in importance. We expect that the community exerted a greater impact in the low socioeconomic groups as the elite were less constrained by proximity and, therefore, more exposed to new ideas crossing community borders. Using micro-census data from 1880, 1890, and 1900, we use multilevel analysis to estimate measures of intra-class correlation within areas. We measure net fertility by the number of own children under five living in the household to currently married women with their spouses present. Parish is used as proxy for community. Our results indicate that despite average differences in fertility across parishes, the correlation between individuals belonging to the same community is less than 2.5%, that is, only a negligible share of the number of children observed is attributable to true community effects. Contrary to our expectation, we do not find any substantial change over time. However, as expected, community has a greater impact in the low socioeconomic groups. Our findings suggest that it is who you are rather than where you live which explains fertility behaviour during the initial stages of the transition. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous researchers have found that traditional determinants explain only a limited part of the variation in perinatal and infant mortality at the family level. In the study reported in this paper, we explored the factors that make the perinatal/neonatal death risk more heterogeneous across families. We estimated logistic regressions with cluster random effects at the maternal level, using data from the Italian village of Granarolo from 1900 to 1939. We estimated the effects of selected predictors on perinatal/neonatal mortality and unexplained inter-family variation. We found that non-rural skilled and lower-skilled workers experienced higher perinatal and neonatal mortality risks. Unexplained heterogeneity at the maternal level was lower for women living in sharecropper families than for those in landless labourer and non-rural worker families. Unexplained perinatal and neonatal mortality components were also due to socio-economic differences and were not necessarily related only to maternal biological features or shared genetic frailty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the Swedish census of 1900, the child-woman ratio and own-children method have been applied to assess socioeconomic differences in fertility. These indirect estimates of fertility have been compared to the vital statistics at the national level to assess their reliability. This comparison demonstrated that the estimated results suffered from few errors. Even if these indirect estimates of fertility could be affected by possible socioeconomic differences in mortality, the tests show that at least in the Swedish case, the impact of mortality on the indirect measures is limited. As infant mortality differences by socioeconomic status are relatively small, indirect fertility estimates are mainly affected by differences in reproductive behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recent decades, main demographic historical research assessed the importance of bio-demographic components in human reproduction, before the diffusion of birth control and contraceptive techniques. According to this dominant view, before fertility decline, marital fertility was mainly regulated by biological and physiological factors and socio-economic factors played only a limited and indirect role. In order to demonstrate the importance of non-biological components, the present study focuses on six pre-transitional communities situated in different geographic areas of Italy. The work aims to demonstrate how fertility levels could significantly be affected by social and economic factors even in natural fertility populations, before the diffusion of contraceptives. Micro-level data are collected from several historical sources, and discrete-time event history models are applied to female reproductive careers in order to estimate effects of socio-economic status, household structure, and price fluctuations on marital fertility, controlling for several bio-demographic factors. Despite clear differences in geographic localization and environment, marital reproductive behavior appeared to be significantly and constantly affected by socio-economic status, household composition, and price levels in all the investigated communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We used micro-level data from the censuses of 1900 to investigate the impact of socio-economic status on net fertility during the fertility transition in five Northern American and European countries (Canada, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and the USA). The study is therefore unlike most previous research on the historical fertility transition, which used aggregate data to examine economic correlates of demographic behaviour at regional or national levels. Our data included information on number of children by age, occupation of the mother and father, place of residence, and household context. The results show highly similar patterns across countries, with the elite and upper middle classes having considerably lower net fertility early in the transition. These patterns remain after controlling for a range of individual and community-level fertility determinants and geographical unobserved heterogeneity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We examined the effects of nutritional stress on maternal mortality arising from short-term economic crises in eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century Germany, and how these effects might have been mitigated by socio-economic status. Historical data from six German villages were used to assess how socio-economic conditions and short-term economic crises following poor harvests may have affected maternal mortality. The results show that 1 year after an increase in grain prices the risk of maternal death increased significantly amongst the wives of those working outside the agricultural sector, and more so than for the wives of those working on farms. Nutritional crises seem to have had a significantly stronger impact on maternal mortality in the period 2–6 weeks after childbirth, when mothers were most prone to infections and indirect, obstetrical causes of maternal death. The findings indicate that both nutritional stress and socio-economic factors contributed to maternal mortality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article contains the initial results of a larger research project that adopts a micro-data perspective to re-examine the fertility transition in Italy. The present study considers the communities of San Donnino and San Nicolò di Villola, two rural parishes situated in the northeastern suburban hinterland of Bologna. Its purpose is to confirm the theory that, even in the pretransitional era, reproductive behavior was significantly shaped by the specific features of the domestic economy and the family situation. In this context, the rural hinterland of Bologna offers an illuminating socioeconomic profile, since it was characterized by the typical Italian sharecropping economy based on large-scale families. Previous studies about the influence of kin on fertility in pre- and posttransitional periods and the peculiarly high fertility level of sharecropping families indicate that a newborn represented an asset to sharecroppers, since children often performed light agricultural tasks. The younger and older women living in large and complex sharecropping families could offer immediate child-care support, reducing the opportunity cost of a birth to the child's parents. In addition to further examining the importance of family context for reproductive outcomes, this study also tests whether the socioeconomic transformations of the late nineteenth century determined family characteristics and thus--according to our expectations--reproductive behavior. Because an aggregative approach is inadequate to the assessment of specific mechanisms of reproductive behavior, we adopt a micro-analytic methodology, drawing on data that combine information from parish registers and Status Animarum. The process of longitudinal reconstruction engaged herein goes beyond traditional family reconstitution, not only taking into account the sequence of events in individual life histories and the female population at risk of childbirth but also identifying household structure and socioeconomic status at the time of each child's birth. The results invite comparison to the findings from another study of reproductive behavior in two central Italian villages, Madregolo in Tuscany and Casalguidi near Parma. These two communities were analyzed with the same sources, longitudinal approach, and discrete event-history model as the two parishes examined herein. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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