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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]

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 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]

The net reproduction ratio (NRR) is a useful measure of the growth of a population from one generation to the next. Like the expectation of life, it is based on a stable or Malthusian population and is not influenced by the actual population structure. Its use in this country was first advocated by Robert Kuczynski in the 1930s and, despite some reservations, it is still published for this and many other countries, particularly in the United Nations Demographic Yearbook. Kuczynski attributed its origin to Richard Boeckh, who, at the relevant time, around 1890, was Director of the Statistical Office of the City of Berlin. Boeckh discusses his data and the problems met. He estimates, for example, that two-ninths of all illegitimate children are subsequently legitimized by the marriage of their parents. In a census they are reported as legitimate, producing an inconsistency between census and registration data. He checks reliability, for example by showing that the decrease in the number of marriages with successive numbers of children is regular. At that time, no details of mother's age at birth were collected at registration in England. For this reason, Farr starts with Norwegian data as preferable to those from Scotland, Sweden or Denmark where this information was also available.

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]

This study uses income accumulated over ages 20–60 to examine whether richer or poorer individuals have more children. Income histories are calculated using yearly administrative register data from contemporary Sweden for cohorts born 1940–70. Differences by parity and income distribution are examined separately by sex. There is a strong positive gradient between accumulated disposable income (and to a lesser extent earnings) and fertility for men in all cohorts and a gradual transformation from a negative to a positive gradient for women. In particular, accumulated incomes are substantially lower for childless men and women than those with children. For men, fertility increases monotonically with increasing income, whereas for women much of the positive gradient results from low fertility among women with very low accumulated incomes in later cohorts. Most of the positive income–fertility gradient can be explained by the high incomes of men and women with two to four children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Age gaps between partners have undergone dramatic changes in high-income countries over the past century. Yet, there has been little focus on age gaps for immigrants and their descendants. This is an important omission because age gaps can be interpreted as a macro-level indicator of intergenerational adaptation. We examine the age gaps of biological parents (childbearing partners) among immigrants and their descendants in Sweden, a country with high gender equality and a stable mean age gap. Using longitudinal, whole-population data, we examine changes in age gaps for cohorts born 1950–86. Cohort trends in age gaps often follow very different patterns for male and female immigrants, with limited evidence of adaptation across cohorts. However, there is considerable evidence of adaptation towards the Swedish norm among the second generation, including from direct comparison between immigrants and their children. The largest differences between women and men are seen among the first generation with a Swedish-born partner. [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]

Demographic changes affect population growth not only during the same period, but also in later years. A method for measuring those later effects is developed in this paper, by adopting a cohort perspective of population growth and decomposing the current growth rate into contributions of past demographic changes. Its application to 210 years of Swedish demographic history indicates that events several decades ago could exert substantial impacts on current population growth. The decomposition results reflect some typical patterns of demographic and epidemiological transitions as well as such historically unique events as the baby boom of the mid- 1940s and the emigration boom to the United States. In addition, the results provide a quantitative explanation for the puzzling combination of the positive actual and negative intrinsic growth rates in recent Sweden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper a method for decomposing rural-urban fertility differences into separate differences in nuptiality and marital fertility is developed. This technique is applied to national and provincial statistics for two countries, Japan and Sweden. It is shown that there are some features of rural-urban differences which hold for both countries, but it is also demonstrated that because the Japanese and Swedish fertility transitions were markedly dissimilar, there are salient contrasts in the relation between the magnitude and composition of the rural-urban differences and the stage reached in each country during its fertility transition.

The article analysis short-run variations in marital fertility in Sweden during the period 1830-1879 in order to explore different models of fertility determination before the secular decline of fertility took place, and to use fertility data to demonstrate a method of studying sociological trends and oscillations. One of the main determinants of aggregate marital fertility, the total number of legitimate births or the legitimate birth rate, is the number of marriages, and fluctuations in that number. It will be shown that if this were the sole determinant the result would be a very high degree of smoothness in the response, fertility. Auto-correlations would be high, much higher than actually observed. So a simple inspection of the response series and the correlogram is sufficient to reject this explanation, even if there were no direct statistical information on the annual number of marriages. But as direct information on marriages is available, this may be used to compute the expected level of aggregate marital fertility assuming a constant fertility schedule by duration of marriage. This turns out to follow the smooth pattern predicted, whilst observed fertility shows much more pronounced short-term variations.

This study aims to present an alternative measure of fertility—cross-sectional average length of life by parity (CALP)—which: (1) is a period fertility indicator using all available cohort information; (2) captures the dynamics of parity transitions; and (3) links information on fertility quantum and timing together as part of a single phenomenon. Using data from the Human Fertility Database, we calculate CALP for 12 countries in the Global North. Our results show that women spend the longest time at parity zero on average, and in countries where women spend comparatively longer time at parity zero, they spend fewer years at parities one and two. The analysis is extended by decomposing the differences in CALPs between Sweden and the United States, revealing age- and cohort-specific contributions to population-level differences in parity-specific fertility patterns. The decomposition illustrates how high teenage fertility in the United States dominates the differences between these two countries in the time spent at different parities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Only children (with no full biological siblings) are a growing subgroup in many high-income settings. Previous studies have largely focused on the short-term developmental outcomes of only children, but there is limited evidence on their health outcomes. Using Swedish population register data for cohorts born 1940–75, we compare the health of only children with that of children from multi-child sibling groups, taking into account birth order, family size, and presence of half-siblings. Only children showed lower height and fitness scores, were more likely to be overweight/obese in late adolescence, and experienced higher later-life mortality than those with one or two siblings. However, only children without half-siblings were consistently healthier than those with half-siblings, suggesting that parental disruption confers additional disadvantages. The health disadvantage was attenuated but not fully explained by adjustment for parental characteristics and after using within-family maternal cousin comparison designs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Family formation, a process that includes union formation, fertility, and their timing and order, has become increasingly diverse and complex in Europe. We examine how the relationship between socio-economic background and family formation has changed over time in France, Italy, Romania, and Sweden, using first wave Generations and Gender Survey data. Competing Trajectories Analysis, a procedure which combines event-history analysis with sequence analysis, allows us to examine family formation as a process, capturing differences in both the timing of the start of family formation and the pathways that young adults follow. Regarding timing, socio-economic background differences in France and Sweden have remained relatively small, whereas in Italy and Romania higher parental education has become more strongly associated with postponement. Pathways tend to diverge by socio-economic background, particularly in Sweden and France. These results indicate that while family formation patterns have changed, they continue to be stratified by socio-economic background. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The migrant mortality advantage has been observed extensively, but its authenticity is debated. In particular, concerns persist that the advantage is an artefact of the data, generated by the problems of recording mobility among foreign-born populations. Here, we build on the intersection of two recent developments: the first showing substantial age variation in the advantage—a deep U-shaped advantage at peak migration ages—and the second showing high levels of population over-coverage, the principal source of data artefact, at the same ages. We use event history analysis of Sweden's population registers (2010–15) to test whether this over-coverage can explain age variation in the migrant mortality advantage. We document its U-shape in Sweden and, crucially, demonstrate that large mortality differentials persist after adjusting for estimated over-coverage. Our findings contribute to ongoing debate by demonstrating that the migrant mortality advantage is real and by ruling out one of its primary mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using information on stated motives for migrating among working-age individuals in the 2007 Swedish Motives for Migration survey (N = 1,852), we use multinomial logistic regression to examine whether and how moves for family reasons are linked to labour market outcomes in ways that differ from migration initiated for other motives, including more overtly labour-related factors. The results indicate that family-based migration is associated with worse labour market outcomes than migration for employment or other reasons. Additionally, family-motivated migrants with co-resident children are more likely to experience labour market deterioration than those without children. Among those who were unemployed before moving, those who reported family as a motive for moving were significantly more likely to be employed after the move. These results help us better assess how families and social networks impact economic outcomes—negatively in some circumstances and positively in others. [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]

Using the iterative intra-cohort interpolation procedure, this article tries to remedy the lack of data on home-leaving by providing an international comparison of estimated census-based single-year age-specific net rates of leaving home for males and females in China, Japan, South Korea, United States, France, and Sweden. It demonstrates that large differences in the age pattern of leaving the parental home between the East Asian and the Western countries. For example, the median ages at home-leaving of males and females in the three East Asian countries studied were higher than those in the three Western countries studied by a margin of 2-3 years. The role played by social and cultural traditions as well as by ethnic ideologies in the large differences in the home- leaving pattern between the East Asian and Western countries is also considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article reviews a previous investigation relating to a small Swedish isolate in Estonia. A brief description is given of ways of obtaining data on fertility and sterility, etc., from parish registrations. The period observed is 1840-1900 when no family limitation seems to have existed. The frequency of sterility is studied, by observing the time when the last child of the marriage was born. A decrement table is derived from the frequencies of last births, and from this the mean expectation of the fertile period may be calculated. Duration of marriage at the last birth is used for calculating fecundity rates by modifying a method previously given by S. G. W. Wahlund. Intervals between successive births are discussed. Some specific observations are made concerning possible causes of variation, and the effect of pen-natal mortality on fertility is demonstrated. Finally, methods for calculating legitimate fertility rates by order of birth are classified. These are closely related to techniques developed in later years for studying the populations of entire countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large body of research has shown that children born after especially short or long birth intervals experience an elevated risk of poor perinatal outcomes, but recent work suggests this may be explained by confounding by unobserved family characteristics. We use Swedish population data on cohorts born 1981–2010 and sibling fixed effects to examine whether the length of the birth interval preceding the index child influences the risk of preterm birth, low birth weight, and hospitalization during childhood. We also present analyses stratified by salient social characteristics, such as maternal educational level and maternal country of birth. We find few effects of birth intervals on our outcomes, except for very short intervals (less than seven months) and very long intervals (>60 months). We find few differences in the patterns by maternal educational level or maternal country of origin after stratifying by the mother's highest educational attainment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Estimating the number of individuals living in a country is an essential task for demographers. This study assesses the potential bias in estimating the size of different migrant populations due to over-coverage in population registers. Over-coverage—individuals registered but not living in a country—is an increasingly pressing phenomenon; however, there is no common understanding of how to deal with over-coverage in demographic research. This study examines different approaches to and improvements in over-coverage estimation using Swedish total population register data. We assess over-coverage levels across migrant groups, test how estimates of age-specific death and fertility rates are affected when adjusting for over-coverage, and examine whether over-coverage can explain part of the healthy migrant paradox. Our results confirm the existence of over-coverage and we find substantial changes in mortality and fertility rates, when adjusted, for people of migrating age. Accounting for over-coverage is particularly important for correctly estimating migrant fertility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study is to investigate spatial mobility over time. Research on ‘new mobilities’ suggests increasing movement of individuals, technology, and information. By contrast, studies of internal migration report declining spatial mobility in recent decades. Using longitudinal register data from Sweden, we calculate annual order-specific migration rates to investigate the spatial mobility of young adults over the last three decades. We standardize mobility rates for educational enrolment, educational level, family status, and place of residence to determine how much changes in individuals’ life domains explain changes in mobility. Young adults’ migration rates increased significantly in the 1990s; although all order-specific migration rates increased, first migration rates increased the most. Changes in population composition, particularly increased enrolment in higher education, accounted for much of the elevated spatial mobility in the 1990s. The analysis supports neither ever increasing mobility nor a long-term rise in rootedness among young adults in Sweden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As parental ages at birth continue to rise, concerns about the effects of fertility postponement on offspring are increasing. Due to reproductive ageing, advanced parental ages have been associated with negative health outcomes for offspring, including decreased longevity. The literature, however, has neglected to examine the potential benefits of being born at a later date. Secular declines in mortality mean that later birth cohorts are living longer. We analyse mortality over ages 30-74 among 1.9 million Swedish men and women born 1938-60, and use a sibling comparison design that accounts for all time-invariant factors shared by the siblings. When incorporating cohort improvements in mortality, we find that those born to older mothers do not suffer any significant mortality disadvantage, and that those born to older fathers have lower mortality. These findings are likely to be explained by secular declines in mortality counterbalancing the negative effects of reproductive ageing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Demographic research has paid much attention to the impact of childhood conditions on adult mortality. We focus on one of the key aspects of early life conditions, sibling group size, and examine the causal effect of growing up in a large family on mortality. While previous studies have focused on low- or middle-income countries, we examine whether growing up in a large family is a disadvantage in Sweden, a context where most parents have adequate resources, which are complemented by a generous welfare state. We used Swedish register data and frailty models, examining all-cause and cause-specific mortality between the ages of 40 and 74 for the 1938-72 cohorts, and also a quasi-experimental approach that exploited multiple births as a source of exogenous variation in the number of siblings. Overall our results do not indicate that growing up in a large family has a detrimental effect on longevity in Sweden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of the intergenerational transmission of fertility has a long history in demography, but until now research has focused primarily on parents' influence on their children's fertility patterns and has largely overlooked the possible influence of other kin. This study examines the transmission of fertility patterns from parents, grandparents, uncles, and aunts, using event history models to determine the risk of first, second, and third births. Swedish register data are used to study the 1970–82 birth cohorts. The findings indicate strong associations between the fertility of index persons and that of their parents, and also independent associations between the completed fertility of index persons and that of their grandparents and parents' siblings. The results suggest that, when examining background effects in fertility research, it is relevant to take a multigenerational perspective and to consider the characteristics of extended kin. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Usually seen as a forerunner in the development of new trends in family-demographic behaviour, Sweden has recently experienced a reversal in marriage trends, from a steady decline in marriage rate between the 1960s and 1990s, to a steady increase beginning in 1998. An event-history analysis of women's first marriages in the period 1991-2007, using register data, shows that compositional changes in labour-market activity and childbearing can only partly explain the reversal, and that apparently no part of it is explained by compositional changes in age, country of birth, educational level, and type of settlement. The evidence suggests that the popularity of marriage in Sweden is increasing, in contrast to what might be expected from the way demographic trends in Sweden and other Western countries are often portrayed in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several studies have demonstrated that stepfamily couples have a higher risk of childbearing than couples in a stable union with the same total number of children. Analysing retrospective data from a nationally representative sample of Swedish adults, we find that the risk of a second or third birth is higher when it is the first or second child in a new union. We also find a faster pace of childbearing after stepfamily formation than after a shared birth. The risk of a second birth (in total) is only a little higher in the first two years after stepfamily formation than in the first two years after a shared birth, and thereafter the risk is lower for stepfamilies. The risk of a third birth (in total) is particularly high early in the stepfamily union and remains higher than that of couples with two shared children for at least five years. The stepfamily difference was lower after than before 1980, when the Swedish government introduced parental leave incentives for short birth intervals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An analysis of infant mortality (based on 133,448 births) in two regions, Sundsvall and Skellefteå, in north-eastern Sweden during the nineteenth century shows that infant mortality was highly clustered with a relatively small number of families accounting for a large proportion of all infant deaths. Using logistic regression, two important factors were found to be associated with high-risk families: (i) a biological component evidenced by an over-representation of women who had experienced stillbirths, and (ii) a social component indicated by an increased risk among women who had remarried. The results strengthen the argument for using the family rather than the single child as the unit of analysis. The clustering of infant deaths points to the need to re-evaluate our interpretations of the causes of infant mortality in the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The standardized rate of third births declined by over 50 percent in Austria between the late 1970s and the mid-1990s. The third birth was also postponed gradually over the years until 1991-92, after which the tempo of childbearing suddenly increased in response to a change in the parental-leave policy. This new policy inadvertently favoured women who had their second or subsequent child shortly after their previous one. We cannot find any indication that the general decline in third births can be seen as a consequence of women's increasing independence from their husbands at the stage in life we study. Furthermore, it still seems to be more difficult to combine motherhood and labour-force participation in Austria than in Sweden, which is a leader in reducing this incompatibility. These developments reflect the tension between advancing gender equality and the dominance of traditional norms in Austria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We focus on the fertility of Swedish men and women who lived in a consensual or marital union in the 1970s and 1980s, and where at least one of the partners had children before they entered that union. Couples without any children before the current union were included for contrast. We find clear evidence that couples wanted a shared biological child, essentially regardless of how many children (if any) they had before their current union. The shared child seems to have served to demonstrate commitment to the union, as did its conversion into a formal marriage. We have not found much support for the hypothesis that our respondents sought to enter parenthood to attain adult status. A second birth might have been valued because it provided a sibling for the first child -- a half-sibling acting as a substitute for a full sibling -- but our evidence for such effects is contradictory. Our analysis makes it very clear that parity progression depends on whose parity we consider. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports that in Sweden period total fertility has risen continuously since the mid-1980s. Although similar trends can be found in other West European countries, the case of Sweden is remarkable: total fertility is relatively high, and the increase has been fairly steep. Translation methods cannot be applied to study parity-specific fertility, mortality, or first marriage rates, because these methods were devised to investigate repeatable events, such as age-specific fertility irrespective of parity. The salient feature of rates relating to repeatable events is that they can be simply totalled, both when cohorts and periods are studied, to yield indices of quantum. An analytical treatment of the reciprocal relations between cohort and period indices, known as translation methods, was provided by researcher N.B. Ryder some 30 years ago. His work has shed considerable light on the relationship between quantum and tempo for both cohort and period studies. These methods make it possible to isolate the impact on period quantum of changes in cohort tempo and changes in cohort quantum.

This study examines risk factors for infant mortality using individual-level data from a sample of parishes in northern Sweden in the nineteenth century. Sweden is of particular interest because of its unusually regular pattern of infant mortality decline during the century. We follow a sample of women longitudinally through their successive pregnancies and observe the mortality experience of each child. Exploratory and multivariate logistic regression analyses reveal an important intra-familial dimension to infant mortality that appears from the early stages of a woman's reproductive career. In addition, multivariate analyses by birth-order group suggest that ignoring intra-familial correlations of infant mortality may result in incorrect inferences. Siblings' shared probabilities of dying as infants suggest that high-birth-order children were not necessarily disadvantaged in any systematic way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data from Hungary and Sweden are used to investigate the extent to which prematurity confounds the relationship between length of preceding birth interval and perinatal mortality. Controlling for length of gestation removes between 65 and 90 per cent of the excess mortality associated with birth intervals of less than 18 months; however, mortality among infants who are born less than 18 months after the birth of their previous sibling is still higher than among infants born after longer intervals. These results suggest that, although short birth intervals are associated with high perinatal mortality, estimates of the risks attributable to birth-spacing are overstated, if length of gestation is not taken into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents partial results from a study of the relation between trends in women's labour-force participation and second and third births in which other individual-level factors are taken into consideration the woman's education, her social background, and her previous demographic behavior. Although men and women entered their first conjugal union at steadily younger ages, they delayed their first births considerably, so that by 1981 only half of all 26-year-old Swedish women had begun childbearing, compared with about two-thirds 10-15 years earlier. This does not necessarily mean, however, that a higher proportion will remain childless. Most women continued to want children, and the majority of them wanted two children and achieved that aim. Only a small proportion felt satisfied with one child, and there were very few young women who had not yet borne children who expected to remain childless by the end of their reproductive period. A large part of the decline in fertility in Sweden was caused by the sharp drop in the number of third births after the middle 1960s, and it is generally believed that increases in the numbers of third births have contributed much to the recent moderate recovery in Swedish fertility.

The article presents information on recent developments in Swedish population policy. Sweden is one of the countries in which the demographic situation has been most serious. And it is also a country in which one of the most comprehensive programmes of population policies has been put forward and implemented. In 1935 the first Population Commission was set up. The Commission made several inquiries into various aspects of the population problem, including the question of the causes of the declining birth-rate, and in the years 1936-8 put forward a number of proposals. The new Commission set up in 1946 discussed various aspects of population policy without feeling bound either by the work or by the points of view of its predecessor. The problems under discussion have been somewhat similar for the two commissions. Sex problem, birth control, voluntary parenthood, and the like, occupied a central position in the work of the first Commission, but this was not the case for the new Commission.

This concludes the study, the first part of which appeared in vol. II, no. I of Population Studies. The present section deals with such collective schemes as free confinement services for all mothers, maternity and infant homes, free admittance to maternity and infant welfare clinics, non-residential child welfare. institutions, free school meals and free travel for mothers and children. The chief measure in Swedish population policy is the child allowance granted to all children in all families. Children of invalids, widows, unmarried mothers, etc., receive supplementary grants. Provisions aiming to overcome man-power difficulties in industry and in the home are discussed including immigration, the rationalization of house-hold work, home helps service, etc. The proposal for a Population Institute is considered and the cost of the various measures of Swedish population policy is estimated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Demographers have attempted to graduate schedules of age-specific fertility rates since the 1930's and there are now several functions which could be fitted to these rates. But little work has been done to date to construct model schedules of fertility. An exploratory study to examine the possibility of fitting certain mathematical formulae to cumulative fertility rates of marriage cohorts in England and Wales revealed the existence of a common pattern showing how mean family sizes of the different age-at-marriage groups of a given marriage cohort, are built up over the childbearing span. To test the adequacy of the generated system for describing observed fertility distributions, the researchers have estimated the distribution of mean family sizes by age at and duration of marriage, for a selection of marriage cohorts of completed fertility in England and Wales and Sweden using various methods. The adequacy of the generated system to describe widely different childbearing patterns suggests that the researchers have a useful tool for fertility projections because, if they are prepared to accept the idea that "a marriage cohort carries its own fertility pattern with it", it follows that changes in fertility patterns consist mainly of a shift of the location of the cumulative fertility curve on the standardized vertical and horizontal scales.

In Western society the process of fertility decline is often regarded as an innovation process. The assumptions behind this approach seem rather questionable, and the diffusion lags or gradients of limited importance. Both Swedish and other European data are used as illustrations. It is suggested that the decline be treated within the wider sociological perspective of a time-consuming adjustment or change process, not necessarily starting from a position of completely uncontrolled fertility within marriage. The situation in to-day's high fertility populations is briefly discussed against this background. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the Swedish population thought in the eighteenth century. Eighteenth-century Sweden is best known to demographers for the establishment at mid-century of the first of the modern series of official population data. The period also has some particular interest for the history of population thought because of the position of Sweden, a peripheral nation somewhat outside the main currents of European development at the time, where the older way life continued and where the cultural revolution of agricultural change and industrialization came relatively late. In eighteenth-century Swedish population thought there lingered some remnants of the older and harsher conception that the individual exists for the good of the state, that the means of subsistence are rigidly limited, that the state or community is entitled to restrict individual liberty, as in marriage and land-holding, and that the public good is advanced by poverty of the workers. More prominent in Swedish population thought at this time, however, were the newer cameralist and mercantilist ideas. It was a period of active intellectual and business contacts abroad. It had long been royal policy to bring distinguished foreigners to the court and to the universities. One gets an impression of considerable internationalism in the aristocracy and the upper classes.

In studies of the fertility of migrants in which the data are confined to the migrants only, estimation bias will normally appear in comparisons of childbearing before and after migration. The same issue arises in studies of union formation before and after first birth, marriage formation before and after home purchase, and in any other comparison of behaviour before and after an index event if one confines the study only to those who have experienced the index event. It is normally better to avoid analysis of behaviour before the index event because such analysis actually conditions on the later arrival of the index event. In this paper, we provide graphical and mathematical representations of this problem and show how one can get a meaningful (unconditional) comparison of behaviour before and after the index event provided the data contain enough information for both sub-periods. Otherwise, the analyst should refrain from making a comparison of this nature.