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This article examines emerging trends in childbearing, marital status, and earnings for U.S. women over young adulthood across recent birth cohorts spanning the late baby boom and Generation X. We use a unique dataset that matches the 1990, 1996, and 2004 fertility and marital history modules of the Survey of Income and Program Participation with Social Security Administration longitudinal earnings records derived from survey respondents’ own tax records. While there have been some cohort-level changes, we find little empirical evidence of large-scale shifts in the family and earnings histories of young adult women born toward the end of Generation X, particularly college graduates, relative to their late baby-boom counterparts at the same stage of the life course. The broader implications of our findings and directions for further research are discussed.

As the baby boom cohorts expand the number of U.S. retirees, population estimates of the employment, withdrawal and reentry behaviors of older Americans' remain scarce. How long do people work? How frequently is retirement reversed? How many years are people retired? What is the modal age of retirement? And, how do the patterns for women compare to those for men? Using the 1992-2004 Health and Retirement Study, we estimate multistate working life tables to update information on the age-graded regularities of the retirement life course of men and women in the United States. We find that at age 50 men can expect to spend half of their remaining lives working for pay, while women can expect to spend just one-third. Half of all men and women have left the labor force by ages 63 and 61, respectively. Although the majority of retirement exits are final, variation in the nature and duration of the retirement process is substantial, as about a third of men's and women's exits are reversed. By quantifying these patterns for men and women, we provide a sound empirical basis for evaluating policy designed to address the financial pressures population aging places on public and private pension systems.

Despite comparatively modest welfare reforms in Canada relative to those of the United States, employment rates and earnings among single mothers have risen by virtually identical magnitudes in the two countries since 1980. We show that most of the gains in Canada and a substantial share of the change in the US were the result of the dynamics of cohort replacement and population aging as the large and better educated baby boom generation replaced earlier cohorts and began entering their forties. In both countries, demographic effects were the main factor accounting for higher employment and earnings among older (40+) single mothers. Changes among younger single mothers, in contrast, were mainly the result of changes in labor market behavior and other unmeasured variables. Overall, demographic changes dominated in Canada but not in the US for two reasons: (a) Canadian single mothers are significantly older than their US counterparts; and (b) consistent with the welfare reform thesis, the magnitude of behavioral change among younger single mothers was much larger in the US.

The cohort is a key concept in the study of social demography and social change. The enduring influence of cohort membership can arise from history-based and/or size-based effects. The most prominent proponent of size-based cohort effects is Easterlin (Birth and fortune: The impact of numbers on personal welfare, 1980) who argues that individuals hailing from unusually large cohorts will experience adverse labor market conditions relative to the members of the smaller cohorts that bracket them. Drawing on data from the March Current Population Survey for the period spanning 1974–2004, we examine the influence of relative cohort size on underemployment. The results provide modest support for the Easterlin thesis, showing the odds of underemployment to be greatest among members of relatively large cohorts, net of other significant predictors. The results also show that the impact of relative cohort size differs by educational level, suggesting that adverse economic conditions produced by large cohort size can be offset by broader changes in the labor market and other social institutions.

Federal housing policy in the US across the postwar period supported the construction of new houses more than public provision or renovation of older structures as a means of ensuring a sufficient supply of quality dwellings. Understanding trends in new housing in particular is thus crucial to understanding the housing regime. Following Myers (Housing demography: Linking demographic structure and housing markets. University of Wisconsin Press, 1990; Housing Studies, 14, 473–490,1999), this paper conceptualizes historical change in the housing stock within a demographic framework as the movement of cohorts of households through cohorts of housing stock. Recent evidence suggests that a new cohort of houses arose in the 1980s and 1990s (larger with more amenities than past vintages), and that buyers of those new houses were increasingly affluent. In this paper, I link the succession to a new cohort of houses to household cohort succession and examine the increasing affluence of new house buyers by age and cohort, focusing especially on the entry of the Baby Boom generation exactly when the new cohort of houses arrived. I use US Census microdata for 1960–2000 to develop a cohort longitudinal dataset, and analyze historical change in stratification in new house ownership. I find significant shifts between cohorts in income inequality among new house buyers, with implications for the capacity of the housing regime to meet the future needs of an increasingly diverse population.

The age structure of the population affects aggregate saving, which affects growth through investment. Growth in turn is influenced by other age structure effects and feeds back into aggregate saving by well known life cycle mechanisms. Some of these feedbacks are generally ignored in empirical work. Especially the age structure effect on macroeconomic variables is a commonly overlooked, yet easily accessible factor useful for prediction, policy evaluation and design. The connection between age structure, savings and growth in the OECD from 1950 to 1990 illustrates how policy analysis that ignores the macroeconomic effects and feedbacks from age structure changes is liable to lead to faulty and potentially costly conclusions about policy issues.

How diverse is American society and are Americans becoming more or less diverse? Contemporary discussions claim high and increasing diversity, but analyze few actual trends. This paper examines completed family size diversity from 1940 to 2000 by race and across US states. For all groups, regions and the USA as a whole, family size diversity decreased significantly, produced by a combination of fewer small and large families and a general decline in regionally-based differences. Both within and across states the diversity declined in two stages, but regional clusters of states followed different paths. A cluster of Southern Mountain states showed the greatest contrast. Between the 1940s and the early 1970s, a slight baby boom rise in diversity among homogeneous states, was counterbalanced by declining diversity in more diverse states. Black women in all states and white women in Mainstream and Other states showed similar trends during the baby boom years, while white women in the Southern Mountain states failed to show a baby boom increase in large families. For childbearing completed since 1975, regional patterns disappeared and both the range and level of diversity declined further. A national and essentially homogeneous culture of childbearing, initiated during the baby boom years and now facilitated by birth control and abortion, has settled in at below-replacement levels. While the possibility always exists that childbearing pattern might change, there is no current evidence to suggest movement away from this low and homogeneous fertility.

In recent years, a number of celebrities have begun childbearing after age 35. The phenomena of older first-time mothers has received a great deal of attention in the popular press. Are these celebrities indicative of a national trend? Does the increase in fertility portend a reversal of the declines in fertility which have been occurring since the baby boom? The present paper uses central and cumulative birth rates for cohorts of American white women born between 1882 and 1953 to investigate childbearing between ages 35 and 50. While there has been a noticeable upsurge in first birth rates for cohorts in their mid to late 30s in recent years, overall central birth rates for women in their 30s are among the lowest on record, with cumulative birth rates at record low levels. A major reason for this is that these women are having relatively few third and higher order births. These cohorts will need to have a relatively high proportion of births in their older years of childbearing in order to reach replacement level. However, attaining replacement level is unlikely because such a high proportion of women have remained childless at ages 35–40 and a relatively low proportion are having three or more children.