Category Policy
Maternity leave and maternal health – do longer leaves mean better health for mothers?
Lara Bister writes about her master thesis on maternity leave lengths and maternal health in the long-run in Germany.
ISIS violence against Yazidis in Iraq
Valeria Cetorelli writes about results of a new survey that estimates the extent of ISIS violence against Yazidis in Iraq. During the summer of 2014, ISIS subjugated the Nineveh governorate in northern Iraq, home to most of Iraq’s minority groups. These minorities were systematically targeted by ISIS in a violent campaign to ‘purify’ the region […]
Malaria importation from Africa to China driven by investment and migrant workers
Shangjie Lai writes about the role of migration in transmission routes of malaria between sub-Saharan Africa and China. The international spread of infectious diseases including Plasmodium falciparum malaria has been accelerated by increasing human mobility via air travel over recent decades. An emerging route of P. falciparum infection is from Africa to China by Chinese […]
Childlessness in Spain: Tick Tock, Tick Tock, Tick Tock!
In this article, Albert Esteve, Daniel Devolder, and Andreu Domingo provide new insights about childlessness in Spain, drawn from his recent research published in Perspectives Demogràfiques.childlessness in the Spanish context offering a cohort perspective. You can find the complete article on Perspectives Demogràfiques from Centre d’Estudis Demogràfics.
The Art and Science of Being Uncertain
This post from Dr. Jakub Bijak from the University of Southampton discusses the challenges surrounding the management and communication of demographic uncertainty, and the methods available for approaching these problems. Some of the most captivating questions in contemporary demography are about what we do not know: the realms of uncertainty. This is especially visible in population forecasts, which […]
The Pride and Prejudice of Piketty
Prof. dr. Harry van Dalen on Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”. Anyone who has read his fair share of newspapers during the past year must have come across the name of Thomas Piketty and his plea to tackle the problem of income inequality. Numerous reviews and reactions have been raised. To name just […]
How to Tackle the Socioeconomic Inequalities of Teenage Pregnancy
This is a post by Heini Väisänen based on her article “Social Inequalities in Teenage Fertility Outcomes: Childbearing and Abortion Trends of Three Birth Cohorts in Finland”. Heini Väisänen is a PhD candidate in demography at the London School of Economics and Political Science. In the media, Finland is often displayed as an example of […]
Causal inference
Does working as a researcher cause your eyesight to become strained, your back to become hunched, and your social life to become rather limited? Or is this just an association? The fact that I’m even asking this question probably suggests that I need to get out more. But the question of causality arises frequently in […]
Changing patterns: Regional mortality differences and the East-West divide in Germany
Eva Kibele’s (E.U.B.Kibele@rug.nl) guest post is based on her PhD thesis “Regional mortality differences in Germany”, written while she was with the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research and supervised by James W. Vaupel, Gabriele Doblhammer and Vladimir Shkolnikov. Currently she is a postdoc researcher at the Population Research Center of the University of Groningen, […]
Conference News: “Comparing families: does international perspective help?”
This overview has been prepared together with Anna Rybińska, one of the organising committee members of the conference “Comparing families: does international perspective help?”. How to compare families across countries? What such comparisons add to country-specific studies? Has using cross-country comparisons brought us closer to understanding family-related behaviours? Aiming to answer these questions, members of […]
Research spotlight: When legalising abortion isn’t enough
LSE’s Ernestina Coast is the Principal Investigator on a new research project in Zambia that seeks to establish how investment in abortion services impacts the socio-economic conditions of women and their households. Zambia’s relatively liberal abortion laws make the country a rare case in sub-Saharan Africa, a region where abortion is generally prohibited altogether or […]
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