Search

Despite a large literature on the importance of childhood neighbourhoods for life course transitions, there is a lack of fertility studies combining a life‐course perspective with detailed neighbourhood measures. Addressing this gap, we use longitudinal data in which the entire population of a Swedish town is geocoded at the address‐level, 1939–1967, and linked to national registers from 1968 to 2015. We study how social neighbourhoods in childhood influence fertility outcomes by constructing individual neighbourhoods at the address level to measure the social class of nearby childhood neighbours. We analyse the age at first and last birth, children ever born, birth spacing and childlessness. Growing up in higher‐status neighbourhoods is associated with delayed fertility for both men and women, but no association is found for the number of children ever born or for childlessness. Associations are stable over time, and later ages of neighbourhood exposure matter more, especially for men. Contrary to prior literature's focus on the lower classes, our results are driven by higher‐status individuals growing up in distinctly white‐collar neighbourhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Socio-economic differences in mortality are among the most pervasive characteristics of Western societies. While the mortality gradient by income is well established for the period after 1970, knowledge about the origins of this gradient is still rudimentary. We analyse the association between income and cause-specific adult mortality during the period 1905–2014 in an area of southern Sweden, using competing-risk hazard models with individual-level longitudinal data for over 2.2 million person-years and over 35,000 deaths. We find that the present-day income gradient in adult mortality emerged only in the period after the Second World War and did so for the leading causes of death and for men and women largely simultaneously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Childhood poverty increases the likelihood of being poor as an adult. We know relatively little about this persistence of poverty in the past and whether it changed as modern welfare societies developed. This study both analyses determinants of childhood poverty and assesses the association between childhood poverty and economic outcomes in adulthood for men and women who grew up in southern Sweden, and who were followed to adulthood regardless of where in Sweden they resided. Poverty is measured in relative terms. Being raised by a single mother, foreign origin, and being raised in a context where the household head was not employed were important risk factors for childhood poverty. Growing up in relative poverty was in turn associated with low income and education in adulthood. Both the persistence and intensity of childhood poverty mattered, and so did the age during which poverty was experienced. Patterns were similar for men and women, and there was no consistent change over time as the Swedish welfare state expanded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parenthood is often considered a major factor behind gender differences in time allocation, especially between paid work and housework. This article investigates the impact of parenthood on men's and women's daily time use in Sweden and how it changed over the 1990s. The analysis is made using time diary data from the Multinational Time Use Survey (MTUS; N = 13,729) and multivariate Tobit regressions. The results indicate that while parenthood in 1990 - 1991 clearly strengthened the traditional gender division of labor in the household, this was much less the case in 2000 - 2001, when parenthood affected men and women in a more similar way.