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This paper examines the influence of individual and household factors on an individual's propensity to emigrate from Halland, a region in south-west Sweden, to the United States during the era of mass migration in the late nineteenth century. The study has a case-control design, using individual-level longitudinal data for a group of emigrants (cases) and a group of non-emigrants (controls). Results indicate the importance of a family's emigration history; individuals whose relatives had previously moved to the United States were more likely to emigrate themselves. In addition, the results also show how this impact varied between groups and how other factors relating to the individual's life situation affected the migration decision. Thus, this paper shows how chain migration and migration networks play important roles during times of mass migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines social class differences in fertility, using longitudinal micro-level data for a regional sample in Sweden, 1922–2015. Using discrete-time event history models, we estimated the association between social class and parity-specific duration to next birth, adjusting for household income in separate models. Social class was associated with fertility quite independently from income and the association was both parity-dependent and sex-specific. For transitions to parenthood, higher class position was associated with higher fertility for men and lower fertility for women before 1970, but then converged into a positive association for both sexes after 1990. For continued childbearing, a weak U-shaped relationship before 1947 turned into a positive relationship for second births and a negative relationship for higher-order births in the period after 1990. These patterns likely reflect broader changes in work–family compatibility and are connected to profound shifts in labour markets and institutional arrangements in twentieth-century Sweden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International migration flows are considered the most difficult demographic component to forecast and, for that reason, models for forecasting migration are few and relatively undeveloped. This is worrying because, in developed societies, international migration is often the largest component of population growth and most influential in debates about societal and economic change. In this paper, we address the need for better forecasting models of international migration by testing a hierarchical (bilinear) model within the Bayesian inferential framework, recently developed to forecast age and sex patterns of immigration and emigration in the United Kingdom, on other types of migration flow data: age- and sex-specific time series from Sweden, South Korea, and Australia. The performances of the forecasts are compared and assessed with the observed time-series data. The results demonstrate the generality and flexibility of the model and of Bayesian inference for forecasting migration, as well as for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers whether short-term variation in exposure to disease early in life, as measured by a variety of mortality rates, has an effect on the height of young adults. Height information for men born in southern Sweden, 1814–1948, and included in the Scanian Economic Demographic Database (SEDD), was obtained from records of medical inspections carried out as part of Sweden’s system of universal conscription. Community-level infant mortality rates were calculated not only by year of birth but also for time in utero and in the first year of life. Comparison between brothers was used to remove the influence of confounding factors. The results suggest that any effect that exposure to disease in early life, as measured by mortality rates, may have had on height, either through selection or scarring, is likely to have been very weak. Supplementary material for this article is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00324728.2015.1045545 [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper investigates the impact of labour-market attachment on first births of foreign-born women in Sweden. The study uses a longitudinal, register-based dataset consisting of the entire population of immigrants from ten nations and a 5-per-cent random sample of natives. The effects of earned income are evident, with increased income levels increasing the probability of becoming a mother for all observed nationalities. The effects of various forms of participation and non-participation in the labour force do not vary greatly between immigrants and the Swedish-born. Among all subgroups, we find a higher propensity to begin childbearing among those who are established in the labour market. Contrary to popular belief, receiving welfare benefits clearly reduces first-birth intensity for immigrants but not for natives. The similarity in patterns across widely different national groups supports the notion that various institutional factors affecting all subgroups are crucial in influencing childbearing behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analysis of the impact of childbearing history on later-life mortality for ever-married men and women using historical micro-level data of high quality for southern Sweden. The analysis uses a Cox proportional hazards model, estimating the effects on old-age mortality of number of births and timing of first and last births. By studying the effects of previous childbearing on mortality by sex and social status, we also gain important insights into the mechanisms relating childbearing to mortality in old age. The results show that number of children ever born had a statistically significant negative impact on longevity after age 50 for females but not for males. Analysis by social group shows that only landless women experienced higher mortality from having more children, which seems to indicate that the main explanations are to be found in social or economic conditions specific to females, rather than in the strictly biological or physiological effects of childbearing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses the importance of early-life conditions relative to the prevailing conditions for mortality by cause of death in later life using historical data for four rural parishes in southern Sweden for which both demographic and economic data are very good. Longitudinal demographic data for individuals are combined with household socio-economic data and community data on food costs and the disease load using a Cox regression framework. We find strong support for the hypothesis that the disease load experienced during the first year of life has a strong impact on mortality in later life, in particular on the outcome of airborne infectious diseases. Hypotheses about the effects of the disease load on mothers during pregnancy and access to nutrition during first years of life are not supported. Contemporary short-term economic stress on the elderly was generally of limited importance although mortality varied by socio-economic group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although sociologists, demographers, and economists are generally agreed that economic independence enhances the likelihood that men will marry, there is disagreement concerning its effect on women. The view that economic independence weakens women's incentive to marry has probably been the most influential, although it has been subjected to few rigorous empirical tests with individual-level data. In the present paper we examine the predictors of forming a first cohabiting union, of progressing from this union to marriage, and of marrying without previously cohabiting by applying hazard regression to event-history data from the 1992 Swedish Family Survey, supplemented by earnings data extracted from the national taxation register. We test a battery of measures that reflect people's past, current, and potential attachment to the labour market. We find that the correlates of union formation for women are largely indistinguishable from the correlates of union formation for men, and that far from being less likely than other women to cohabit or to marry, women with a greater degree of economic self-sufficiency are more likely to do so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many investigators have found that divorce risks decrease as you move from groups with little educational or social capital to groups with more. This negative educational gradient fits with the notion that people with more education are better at selecting spouses and better at making a marriage work. Other investigators have found a positive gradient, often in populations where the situation is dominated by the individual's ability to handle the divorce process and to cope with the economic and other problems that follow in the wake of a divorce. The sign of the educational gradient in divorce risks seems to depend on the balance between countervailing influences. Information about the gradient over a few educational levels is about as much as you can expect to get from the interview data of a normal-sized general survey. With access to the data from a full-coverage system of the population and educational registers of a sizeable population like that of Sweden, educational effects can be studied in much greater detail. We begin to tap this source in the present paper. When we do, the educational gradient in divorce risks turns out to be too slippery a basis for the general theories that have been developed around it so far, at least in a population where it is reasonably easy to get a divorce and where the hurtful consequences to the divorcees are more limited than elsewhere. There has been no uniform relation between educational level and divorce risk of Swedish women at the various educational levels during the 1970s and 1980s; developments in recent decades in Swedish first-marriage divorce risks have been much more favourable to the more highly educated than to women with less education, and the result is that the educational gradient has become negative as we leave the 1980s. The educational gradient changed sign correspondingly between cohorts born in the mid-1940s and cohorts from the mid-1960s. In a society such... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]