Fathers' Multiple-Partner Fertility and Children's Educational Outcomes

Fathers' multiple-partner fertility (MPF) is associated with substantially worse educational outcomes for children. We focus on children in fathers' second families that are nuclear: households consisting of a man, a woman, their joint children, and no other children. We analyze outcomes for almost 75,000 Norwegian children, all of whom lived in nuclear families until at least age 18. Children with MPF fathers are more likely than other children from nuclear families to drop out of secondary school (24% vs. 17%) and less likely to obtain a bachelor's degree (44% vs. 51%). These gaps remain substantial—at 4 and 5 percentage points, respectively—after we control for child and parental characteristics, such as income, wealth, education, and age. Resource competition with the children in the father's first family does not explain the differences in educational outcomes. We find that the association between a father's previous childless marriage and his children's educational outcomes is similar to that between a father's MPF and his children's educational outcomes. Birth order does not explain these results. This similarity suggests that selection is the primary explanation for the association between fathers' MPF and children's educational outcomes.

Research Note: Gender Differences in Employment During the COVID-19 Epidemic

We investigate the impact of the COVID-19 epidemic on gender disparities in three employment outcomes: labor force participation, full-time employment, and unemployment. Using data from the monthly Current Population Survey, in this research note we test individual fixed-effects models to examine the employment status of women relative to that of men in the nine months following the onset of the epidemic in March of 2020. We also test separate models to examine differences between women and men based on the presence of young children. Because the economic effects of the epidemic coincided with the summer months, when women's employment often declines, we account for seasonality in women's employment status. After doing so, we find that women's full-time employment did not decline significantly relative to that of men during the months following the beginning of the epidemic. Gender gaps in unemployment and labor force participation did increase, however, in the early and later months of the year, respectively. Our findings regarding women's labor force participation and employment have implications for our understanding of the long-term effects of the health crisis on other demographic outcomes.

Revisiting Horizontal Stratification in Higher Education: College Prestige Hierarchy and Educational Assortative Mating in China

Existing research on assortative mating has examined marriage between people with different levels of education, yet heterogeneity in educational assortative mating outcomes of college graduates has been mostly ignored. Using data from the 2010 Chinese Family Panel Study and log-multiplicative models, this study examines the changing structure and association of husbands' and wives' educational attainment between 1980 and 2010, a period in which Chinese higher education experienced rapid expansion and stratification. Results show that the graduates of first-tier institutions are less likely than graduates of lower-ranked colleges to marry someone without a college degree. Moreover, from 1980 to 2010, female first-tier-college graduates were increasingly more likely to marry people who graduated from similarly prestigious colleges, although there is insufficient evidence to draw the same conclusion about their male counterparts. This study thus demonstrates the extent of heterogeneity in educational assortative mating patterns among college graduates and the tendency for elite college graduates to marry within the educational elite.

Contextualizing Educational Disparities in Health: Variations by Race/Ethnicity, Nativity, and County-Level Characteristics

Educational disparities in health are well documented, yet the education–health relationship is inconsistent across racial/ethnic and nativity groups. These inconsistencies may arise from characteristics of the early life environments in which individuals attain their education. We evaluate this possibility by investigating (1) whether educational disparities in cardiometabolic risk vary by race/ethnicity and nativity among Black, Hispanic, and White young adults; (2) the extent to which racial/ethnic-nativity differences in the education–health relationship are contingent on economic, policy, and social characteristics of counties of early life residence; and (3) the county characteristics associated with the best health at higher levels of education for each racial/ethnic-nativity group. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, we find that Black young adults who achieve high levels of education exhibit worse health across a majority of contexts relative to their White and Hispanic counterparts. Additionally, we observe more favorable health at higher levels of education across almost all contexts for White individuals. For all other racial/ethnic-nativity groups, the relationship between education and health depends on the characteristics of the early life counties of residence. Findings highlight place-based factors that may contribute to the development of racial/ethnic and nativity differences in the education–health relationship among U.S. young adults.

In a Stationary Population, the Average Lifespan of the Living Is a Length-Biased Life Expectancy

What is the average lifespan in a stationary population viewed at a single moment in time? Even though periods and cohorts are identical in a stationary population, we show that the answer to this question is not life expectancy but a length-biased version of life expectancy. That is, the distribution of lifespans of the people alive at a single moment is a self-weighted distribution of cohort lifespans, such that longer lifespans have proportionally greater representation. One implication is that if death rates are unchanging, the average lifespan of the current population always exceeds period life expectancy. This result connects stationary population lifespan measures to a well-developed body of statistical results; provides new intuition for established demographic results; generates new insights into the relationship between periods, cohorts, and prevalent cohorts; and offers a framework for thinking about mortality selection more broadly than the concept of demographic frailty.

What Tears Couples Apart: A Machine Learning Analysis of Union Dissolution in Germany

This study contributes to the literature on union dissolution by adopting a machine learning (ML) approach, specifically Random Survival Forests (RSF). We used RSF to analyze data on 2,038 married or cohabiting couples who participated in the German Socio-Economic Panel Survey, and found that RSF had considerably better predictive accuracy than conventional regression models. The man's and the woman's life satisfaction and the woman's percentage of housework were the most important predictors of union dissolution; several other variables (e.g., woman's working hours, being married) also showed substantial predictive power. RSF was able to detect complex patterns of association, and some predictors examined in previous studies showed marginal or null predictive power. Finally, while we found that some personality traits were strongly predictive of union dissolution, no interactions between those traits were evident, possibly reflecting assortative mating by personality traits. From a methodological point of view, the study demonstrates the potential benefits of ML techniques for the analysis of union dissolution and for demographic research in general. Key features of ML include the ability to handle a large number of predictors, the automatic detection of nonlinearities and nonadditivities between predictors and the outcome, generally superior predictive accuracy, and robustness against multicollinearity.

Gendered Diverging Destinies: Changing Family Structures and the Reproduction of Educational Inequalities Among Sons and Daughters in the United States

The prevalence of nontraditional family structures has increased over time, particularly among socioeconomically disadvantaged families. Because children's socioeconomic attainments are positively associated with growing up in a two-parent household, changing family structures are considered to have strengthened the reproduction of social inequalities across generations. However, several studies have shown that childhood family structure relates differently to educational outcomes for sons than for daughters. Therefore, we ask whether there are gender differences in the extent to which changing family structures have contributed to the college attainment gap between children from lower and higher socioeconomic backgrounds. We use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and 1997 cohorts to estimate extended Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition models that take into account cross-cohort changes in the prevalence of family structures and heterogeneity in the effects of childhood family structure on college attainment. We find that the argument that changes in family structures contributed to diverging destinies in college attainment holds for daughters but not for sons. This result is due to the different changes over time in the effects of childhood family structure by gender and socioeconomic background.

Multiple Perspectives on Recent Trends in Unwanted Fertility in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

The last four decades have witnessed large declines in fertility globally. This study uses data from 78 low- and middle-income countries to examine concurrent trends in unwanted fertility. Three measures of unwanted fertility are contrasted: the conventional unwanted total fertility rate, a proposed conditional unwanted fertility rate, and the percentage of births unwanted. Incidence of unwanted births and prevalence of exposure to unwanted births are both derived from answers to questions on prospective fertility preference, recognized as the most valid and reliable survey measure of preferences. Country-level trends are modeled both historically and with the decline in total fertility, with a focus on regional differentials. Results show that unwanted fertility rates—especially the conditional unwanted fertility rate—have declined substantially in recent decades. By contrast, the percentage of births unwanted has declined less, remaining stable or even increasing: from a birth cohort perspective, declines in unwanted fertility have been far more modest than the increased parental success in avoiding unwanted births. The regional patterns suggest that sub-Saharan Africa has several similarities with other major regions but also some peculiar features, including a recent stall in the decline of unwanted fertility that persists after controlling for the stage of fertility transition.

Cohort, Policy, and Process: The Implications for Migrant Fertility in West Germany

Although a growing literature explores the relationship between migration and fertility, far less scholarship has examined how migrant childbearing varies over time, including across migrant cohorts. I extend previous research by exploring migrant-cohort differences in fertility and the role of changing composition by education and type of family migration. Using 1984–2016 German Socio-Economic Panel data, I investigate the transition into first, second, and third birth among foreign-born women in West Germany. Results from an event-history analysis reveal that education and type of family migration—including marriage migration and family reunions—contribute to differences in first birth across migrant cohorts. Specifically, more rapid entry into first birth among recent migrants from Turkey stems from a greater representation of marriage migrants across arrival cohorts, while increasing education is associated with reduced first birth propensities among recent migrants from Southern Europe. I also find variation in the risk of higher parity transitions across migrant cohorts, particularly lower third birth risks among recent arrivals from Turkey, likely a result of changing exposures within origin and destination contexts. These findings suggest that as political and socioeconomic circumstances vary within origin and destination contexts, selection, adaptation, and socialization processes jointly shape childbearing behavior.

The Cross-sectional Average Inequality in Lifespan (CAL†): A Lifespan Variation Measure That Reflects the Mortality Histories of Cohorts

Lifespan variation is a key metric of mortality that describes both individual uncertainty about the length of life and heterogeneity in population health. We propose a novel and timely lifespan variation measure, which we call the cross-sectional average inequality in lifespan, or CAL†. This new index provides an alternative perspective on the analysis of lifespan inequality by combining the mortality histories of all cohorts present in a cross-sectional approach. We demonstrate how differences in the CAL† measure can be decomposed between populations by age and cohort to explore the compression or expansion of mortality in a cohort perspective. We apply these new methods using data from 10 low-mortality countries or regions from 1879 to 2013. CAL† reveals greater uncertainty in the timing of death than the period life table–based indices of variation indicate. Also, country rankings of lifespan inequality vary considerably between period and cross-sectional measures. These differences raise intriguing questions as to which temporal dimension is the most relevant to individuals when considering the uncertainty in the timing of death in planning their life courses.