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The socioeconomic health gradient has widened since the mid-21st century, but the role of childhood neighborhoods remains underexplored. Most neighborhood studies on health are cross-sectional, and longitudinal research is lacking. We analyze how socioeconomic neighborhood conditions in childhood influence cause-specific deaths in adulthood. We use uniquely detailed geocoded longitudinal microdata for the Swedish town of Landskrona, 1939-1967, linked to Swedish national registers, 1968-2015. We measure neighborhood SES by social class and use dynamic sizes of individual neighborhoods. Cox proportional hazards models are employed to estimate the impact of neighbor’s social class in childhood (ages 1-17) on mortality in ages 40-69. We control for class origin, class in adulthood, schools, and physical neighborhood characteristics. The class of the nearby, same-age, childhood neighbors had a lasting effect on male all-cause and preventable, but not non-preventable, mortality. Men who grew up with having 10% more children from white-collar families as close-proximity neighbors had an 8% lower mortality risk due to preventable causes of death in adulthood. The mortality for women was not affected by their childhood neighbors, although both a lower adult class and class origin increased their mortality. Because preventable causes of death are linked to lifestyle factors, this study suggests that childhood neighborhood peers had a strong and lasting influence on the health behavior of men growing up before the health gradient was fully established. Hence, our applied life-course perspective on childhood neighborhoods is crucial to better understand the mortality differentials by SES.

A growing empirical and theoretical literature has investigated to what extent socioeconomic inequalities are influenced by the outcomes and characteristics of ancestors prior to the parental generation. This study contributes by examining multigenerational associations of adulthood earnings and occupational status in the entire Swedish population of boys and girls born 1968–1976, amounting to almost 400,000 three-generation lineages. The study population is followed until 2011, examining to which extent the strength of the grandfather–grandchild association depends on a set of characteristics describing the nature of the multigenerational relationship. More specifically, we investigate to what extent the transmission of attainment is influenced by the degree of overlapping lifespans, residential proximity, and competition for grandparental resources. While a robust multigenerational association exists net of the association between the attainment of parents and children, we do not find any support for the hypotheses that the strength of the association depends on neither the degree of social interaction between generations, nor on the number of siblings and cousins competing for grandparental resources.

This article analyses the long-term development of social class differences in infant and child mortality in an area of southern Sweden, spanning from the early stages of the mortality transition at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to the late 1960s when both infant and child mortality had reached very low levels. Our findings show that infant and child mortality was fairly equal at the beginning of the study period. We find no clear pattern of class differentials in childhood mortality in the first half of the nineteenth century when both infant and child mortality declined. Later in the nineteenth century, class differences started to emerge. This is clear for both post-neonatal mortality and child mortality, while we do not find any class differences in neonatal mortality. Over time, a more or less full gradient emerged for post-neonatal mortality, and a weak gradient also emerged for child mortality. Strikingly, the disadvantaged position for unskilled and lower-skilled workers remained throughout the 1960s, also at a time when mortality levels were very low, and living standards had increased dramatically for all classes in the population. (Less)

Marriage is protective of survival and contributes to healthy ageing, whereas both singlehood and widowhood are related to increased mortality and poor health. The long-term change in the mortality differentials by marital status, and its interaction with gender and social class, has not been systematically addressed in the literature. In this study, we explore the marriage premium for survival and widowhood, bereavement and divorce penalties for survival over time using an established database for Southern Sweden (SEDD) between 1905 and 2015. We show that married men have and had a survival premium, while especially widowers have increased mortality, most strongly directly after bereavement but also in the longer run. It is remarkable that there is such stability in the survival advantage of married men, despite massive social, economic and demographic changes. Mortality differentials by marital status are smaller for women and absent for much of the twentieth century. Over time, it appears that there has been convergence in the patterns of mortality by marital status between men and women. The divergence in mortality by marital status for women started in the blue-collar class. White-collar and blue-collar men were similarly affected by marital status. Overall, we conclude that marital status is important for longevity, and has been so for the entire twentieth century for men, and increasingly also for women.

Maternal height is associated with mortality and anthropometry in low-and-middle-income countries. This paper explored residual associations and potential underlying mechanisms linking maternal height to several child outcomes using regression models with neighborhood and half-sibling fixed effects and Gelbach decomposition on 108 Demographic and Health Surveys from 37 sub-Saharan African countries. When adjusting for time of birth, twinning, sex, and survey, a single z-score (6.5 cm) increase in mother's height was associated with a 22% reduction in the average deficit in height-for-age among children under five (according to the WHO 2006 growth standard), 16% lower neonatal mortality (age1 month) , 10% lower postneonatal mortality (age 1-11 months), 11% lower child mortality (age 12-59 months) , and 2% increase in school attendance among 7-16-year-olds. Adjusting further for maternal education, household living standards, maternal fertility and birth related factors, and neighborhood reduced the coefficients for maternal height by 22% for child height-for-age, 26% for neonatal mortality, 46% for postneonatal mortality, 56% for child mortality, and 90% for school attendance. The decomposition showed that adjusting for neighborhood had a substantial impact on the association of maternal height with all outcomes, especially child mortality. Adjusting for unobserved father and household factors also had a particularly large impact on the association with child mortality. The robustness of the relationship with neonatal mortality suggests that pregnancy and perinatal factors are an important link between maternal height and child outcomes. Adult living standards and socioeconomic and related behavioral factors likely play a small role. Genetics may also play a large role in linking maternal height and child height-for-age, especially for educated mothers, whose height was presumably impacted less by early life adversity.

Higher socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with lower mortality, and this correlation has been confirmed using different indicators across several geographical settings. Nevertheless, the timing of the emergence of the SES gradient remains unclear. We used individual-level longitudinal data for a regional population in southern Sweden covering the period between 1813 and 2014, and we applied a cause-specific proportional hazard model. We estimated SES differences in all-cause, nonpreventable, preventable, and cause-specific adult mortality in four subperiods (1813–1921, 1922–1967, 1968–1989, 1990–2014) by gender adjusting for birth year, place of residence, marital status, and migration status. The SES gradient in mortality present today for both genders emerged only around 1970, and with few exceptions, it emerged at approximately the same time for all causes of death. It emerged earlier for women than for men, particularly in infectious diseases. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we found a positive association between SES and mortality from circulatory diseases for men. SES has not always been a fundamental cause of mortality; it only emerged as such in the second half of the twentieth century. We argue that habits and behaviors embedded in the different social strata played a major role in the emergence of the SES gradient. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1007/s10654-020-00685-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Across today’s developed world, there is a clear mortality gradient by socioeconomic status for all ages. It is often taken for granted that this gradient was as strong—or even stronger—in the past when social transfers were rudimentary and health care systems were less developed. Some studies based on cross-sectional data have supported this view, but others based on longitudinal data found that this was not the case. If there was no gradient in the past, when did it emerge? To answer this question, we examine social class differences in adult mortality for men and women in southern Sweden over a 200-year period, using unique individual-level register data. We find a systematic class gradient in adult mortality emerging at ages 30–59 only after 1950 for women and after 1970 for men, and in subsequent periods also observable for ages 60–89. Given that the mortality gradient emerged when Sweden transitioned into a modern welfare state with substantial social transfers and a universal health care system, this finding points to lifestyle and psychosocial factors as likely determinants.

The societal integration of immigrants is a great concern in many of today’s Western societies, and has been so for a long time. Whether we look at Europe in 2015 or the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, large flows of immigrants pose challenges to receiving societies. While much research has focused on the socioeconomic integration of immigrants there has been less interest in their demographic integration, even though this can tell us as much about the way immigrants fare in their new home country. In this article we study the disparities in infant and child mortality across nativity groups and generations, using new, high-density census data. In addition to describing differentials and trends in child mortality among 14 immigrant groups relative to the native-born white population of native parentage, we focus special attention on the association between child mortality, immigrant assimilation, and the community-level context of where immigrants lived. Our findings indicate substantial nativity differences in child mortality, but also that factors related to the societal integration of immigrants explains a substantial part of these differentials. Our results also point to the importance of spatial patterns and contextual variables in understanding nativity differentials in child mortality.

The decline in human fertility during the demographic transition is one of the most profound changes to human living conditions. To gain a better understanding of this transition we investigate the association between socioeconomic status (SES) and marital fertility in different fertility regimes in a global and historical perspective. We use data for a large number women in 91 different countries for the period 1703–2018 (N = 116,612,473). In the pre-transitional fertility regime the highest SES group had somewhat lower marital fertility than other groups both in terms of children ever born (CEB) and number of surviving children under 5 (CWR). Over the course of the fertility transition, as measured by the different fertility regimes, these rather small initial SES differentials in marital fertility widened, both for CEB and CWR. There was no indication of a convergence in marital fertility by SES in the later stages of the transition. Our results imply a universally negative association between SES and marital fertility and that the fertility differentials widened during the fertility transition.

OBJECTIVE We investigate the association between the geographic proximity of the grandparents on net marital fertility and maternal survival in Sweden, 1900-1910, within the framework of the cooperative-breeding-hypothesis. METHODS Data were derived from Swedish full-count censuses (1880-1910) and the Swedish Death Index. Married couples were linked to their parental households. Poisson and logistic regression analyses were used to investigate the association between the geographical proximity of the grandparents on net marital fertility, which we measured as the number of surviving children born between 1900 and 1910, and the mother's survival. Models were fitted with and without fixed effects to assess the effects of unobserved characteristics shared at the parish and the family level. RESULTS The results indicate that net fertility and maternal survival increased with the husband's parents' geographic proximity. In contrast, we found no evidence that the geographic proximity of the wife's parents was associated with increased fertility or maternal survival. Rather, the presence of the mother's parents in the household lowered net fertility and reduced maternal survival. CONCLUSIONS This study provides evidence that kin proximity was associated with fertility and mortality of married women, and that the associations differed for paternal and maternal kin in the societal context of Swedish nuclear families (1900-1910). However, the patterns of kin proximity that we identified were correlated with characteristics such as socioeconomic status, occupation, and wealth, which also exhibited strong correlations with fertility and survival. Future research assessing the effects of kinship on demographic developments must therefore carefully consider the socio-environmental context.

In questa contributo riportiamo una sintesi dei risultati di un ampio progetto internazionale sul declino storico della fecondità in Svezia e in altri paesi dell’Europa mediante l’utilizzo di dati individuali di censimento. Il progetto ha riguardato lo studio delle differenze di fecondità in termini socio-economici prima e dopo il declino storico della fecondità iniziato nel XIX secolo. Si è dunque adottata una prospettiva storica di lungo periodo che, proprio per l’utilizzo di grandi database di informazioni censuarie, ha reso il progetto unico nell’ambito della ricerca internazionale. In particolare, abbiamo fatto uso del grande database internazionale di micro dati censuari costruito nell’ambito dei progetti North Atlantic Population Project (NAPP) ed Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) .

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.

We study the association between sociospatial neighborhood conditions throughout childhood and educational attainment in adulthood. Using unique longitudinal microdata for a medium-sized Swedish town, we geocode its population at the address level, 1939 to 1967, and link individuals to national registers, 1968 to 2015. Thus, we adopt a long-term perspective on the importance of nearby neighbors during a period when higher education expanded. Applying a method for estimating individual neighborhoods at the address level, we analyze the association between the geographically weighted social class of the nearest 6 to 100 childhood neighbors (ages 2 to 17), and the likelihood of obtaining a university degree by age 40, controlling for both family social class and school districts. We show that even when growing up in a town with relatively low economic inequality, the social class of the nearest same-age neighbors in childhood was associated with educational attainment, and that the associations were similar regardless of class origin. Growing up in low-class neighborhoods lowered educational attainment; growing up in high-class neighborhoods increased attainment. Social class and neighborhoods reinforced each other, implying that high-class children clustered with each other had much higher odds of obtaining a university degree than low-class children from low-class neighborhoods. Thus, even if all groups benefited from the great expansion of free higher education in Sweden (1960s to 1970s), the large inequalities between the classes and neighborhoods remained unchanged throughout the period. These findings show the importance of an advantageous background, both regarding the immediate family and the networks of nearby people of the same age.

Consensus is lacking in the literature about the role of socioeconomic factors on influenza-associated deaths during the 1918 pandemic. Although some scholars have found that social factors were important, others have not. In this study, we analyzed differences in excess mortality by social class in Sweden during the 1918 pandemic. We analyzed individual-level mortality of the entire population aged 30–59 years by combining information from death records with census data on occupation. Social class was measured by an occupation-based class scheme. Excess mortality during the pandemic was measured as the number of deaths relative to the number occurring in the same month the year before. Social class differences in numbers of deaths were modeled using a complementary log-log model that was adjusted for potential confounding at the family, the residential (urban/rural), and the county levels. We found notable class differences in excess mortality but no perfect class gradient. Class differences were somewhat larger for men than for women.

Although intermarriage is a common indicator of immigrant integration into host societies, most research has focused on how individual characteristics determine intermarriage. This study uses the 1910 ipums census sample to analyze how contextual factors affected intermarriage among European immigrants in the United States. Newly available, complete-count census microdata permit the construction of contextual measures at a much lower level of aggregation—the county—in this analysis than in previous studies. Our results confirm most findings in previous research relating to individual-level variables but also find important associations between contextual factors and marital outcomes. The relative size and sex ratio of an origin group, ethnic diversity, the share of the native-born white population, and the proportion of life that immigrants spent in the United State are all associated with exogamy. These patterns are highly similar across genders and immigrant generations.

Most studies on the fertility transition have focused either on macro-level trends or on micro-level patterns with limited geographic scope. Much less attention has been given to the interplay between individual characteristics and contextual conditions, including geographic location. Here we investigate the relevance of geography and socioeconomic status for understanding fertility variation in the initial phase of the Swedish fertility transition. We conduct spatially sensitive multilevel analyses on full-count individual-level census data. Our results show that the elite constituted the vanguard group in the fertility decline and that the shift in fertility behavior occurred quickly among them in virtually all parts of Sweden. Other socioeconomic status groups experienced the decline with some delay, and their decline patterns were more clustered around early centers of the decline. Long-distance migrants initially had higher fertility than people living close to their birthplace. However, as the fertility decline unfolded, this advantage was either reduced or reversed. This supports the view that migration and fertility are linked in this process. Our results confirm that socioeconomic status differences were of considerable relevance in structuring the fertility transition. The degree to which spatial distance fostered spatial variation in the fertility decline seems to have been negatively correlated with socioeconomic status, with the pattern of decline among the elite showing the lowest degree of spatial variation. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1007/s13524-018-0737-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

We study the intergenerational social mobility of women by looking at how migration was associated with socioeconomic marriage mobility using complete-count census data for Sweden. The censuses 1880–1900 have been linked at the individual level, enabling us to follow almost 100,000 women from their parental home to their new marital household. Marriage market imbalances were not an important push factor for migration but we find a strong association between migration distance and marriage outcomes, both in terms of overall marriage probabilities and in terms of partner selection by SES. These results highlight the importance of migration for women's intergenerational social mobility during industrialization.

Focusing on the Swedish census of 1900, the child-woman ratio and own-children method have been applied to assess socioeconomic differences in fertility. These indirect estimates of fertility have been compared to the vital statistics at the national level to assess their reliability. This comparison demonstrated that the estimated results suffered from few errors. Even if these indirect estimates of fertility could be affected by possible socioeconomic differences in mortality, the tests show that at least in the Swedish case, the impact of mortality on the indirect measures is limited. As infant mortality differences by socioeconomic status are relatively small, indirect fertility estimates are mainly affected by differences in reproductive behavior.

This article examines socioeconomic mobility across three generations in Sweden from 1815 and until 2011. Using longitudinal micro-level data from the Scanian Economic-Demographic Database (SEDD), we examine the transmission of socio-economic status along three different dimensions; social class (HISCLASS), occupational status (HISCAM), and earnings. We demonstrate an association between grandfathers' class or occupational status and the outcome of grandsons, when controlling for the association between fathers and sons. The associations remain stable over time and are stronger for paternal grandfathers than for maternal. For earnings, we find no grandparental association.

The social consequences of agrarian change have been widely debated. The traditional view of the lower classes becoming increasingly vulnerable due to the loss of access to resources has been met with the revisionist view that this change was counteracted by an increase in the volume and regularity of employment due to investments and new farming practices. This article address this issue by studying the agricultural revolution in southern Sweden using aggregate data at the parish level. New micro-level data on actual harvest outcomes, supplemented by price data, make it possible to differentiate between the development of the local economy and exogenous price shocks. Our results indicate a clear mortality response to harvest fluctuations in general and to harvest failures in particular. The response differed greatly between farming regions, being strongest in the areas most dependent on grain production. The response also diminished during the agricultural revolution, indicating the increasing efficiency of the local economy. This indicates employment effects in line with the revisionist view. At the same time, vulnerability to fluctuations in prices of basic foodstuffs remained high until the second half of the nineteenth century and was also quite similar across farming regions.

Most previous work on the historical fertility transition has been macro-oriented, using aggregate data to examine economic correlates of demographic behaviour at regional or national levels, while much less has been done using micro data, and specifically looking at behavioural differentials among social groups. In this paper we study at the impact of socioeconomic status on net fertility during the fertility transition in five Northern American and European Countries (Canada, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and the USA). We use micro-level census data in 1900, containing information on number of children by age, occupation of the mother and father, place of residence and household context. The results show highly similar patterns across countries, with the elite and upper middle classes having considerably lower net fertility early in the transition. These patterns remain also after controlling for a range of individual and community-level fertility determinants and geographical unobserved heterogeneity.

The western fertility decline is arguably the most significant demographic change to have occurred in the past 200 years, yet its causes and processes are still shrouded in ambiguity due to a lack of individual-level longitudinal data. A growing body of research has helped improve our understanding of the decline's causes by examining the development of socioeconomic differences in fertility using historical micro-data, but these have largely only considered rural areas where fertility was generally slower to decline. This article contributes to the literature by utilizing individual-level data from the Roteman Database for Stockholm, Sweden between 1878 and 1926 to examine the association of socioeconomic status and fertility and the adoption of stopping behaviour during the city's transition. Using piecewise constant hazard models and logistic regression, we find that a clear class pattern arises in which the elite were early practitioners of fertility control, followed by the working classes. As the transition unfolded, socioeconomic differences in stopping behaviour disappeared and overall fertility differentials were also minimized, both of them being consistent with patterns observed in rural populations. The implications of these findings for major explanations of the decline are discussed in the concluding section.

This work combines economic and demographic data to examine inequality of living standards in Stockholm at the turn of the twentieth century. Using a longitudinal population register with occupational information, we utilize event-history models to show that despite absolute decreases in mortality, relative differences between socioeconomic groups remained virtually constant. The results also show that child mortality continued to be sensitive to short-term fluctuations in wages and that there were no socioeconomic differences in this response. We argue that the persistent inequality in living standards was possibly due to differences in residential patterns and nutrition.

BackgroundDeclines from high levels of under-5 mortality rate (U5MR) first occurred in Western Europe. Knowledge and technologies gained from early mortality reductions could accelerate the U5MR decline for countries that followed. We explored whether average annual reduction (AAR) in U5MR increased between countries over time in the 20th century.MethodsWe used U5MR time series from the Human Mortality Database and United Nations for 110 countries experiencing a decline from 100 to 50 under-5 deaths per 1000 live births during the 20th century.ResultsBetween 1907 and 1938, the AAR was 2.61 (95% CI 2.09, 3.13) deaths per 1000 live births per year on average and increased by 0.06 (95% CI 0.02, 0.10) deaths for each year that passed before the decline started. Countries going through the decline in 1938–1968 and 1968–1999 showed an AAR of 3.96 and 3.67 (95% CI 3.37, 4.54 and 3.26, 4.07), respectively, with no increase in AAR.ConclusionsAcceleration in U5MR reduction was apparent in today’s high-income countries, indicating that greater similarities and capacity may have facilitated the adaptation of mortality reducing knowledge and technologies. Greater emphasis on simple and individual-level interventions or more difficult circumstances may also explain the lack of acceleration in mortality reduction after 1950.

This article studies class attainment and mobility in a long-term perspective, covering the entire transition from a preindustrial to a mature industrial society. Using longitudinal individual-level data for men in a community of southern Sweden, we test different hypotheses linking changing patterns of social mobility and status attainment to the industrialization process. The data allows an analysis of Sweden's complete transition from an agrarian to an industrialized society, and thus to comprehensively address core hypotheses in the stratification literature. Both absolute and relative mobility increased, mainly explained by upward mobility becoming more prevalent. By looking at status attainment into different segments of the middle class and elite, we also see the increasing role played by formal education and meritocracy for the opportunities of people from low-class origin to advance socially. However, this development is more connected with the maturing of industrial society than with industrialization as such.

This paper analyzes the impact of intermarriage on the economic integration of immigrants in Sweden, measured by annual earnings. We use longitudinal register data for the period 1990–2009 for the total population of immigrant men born 1960–1974. The results reveal large intermarriage premiums, but overall this seems to be a result of selection effects as most of the premium is visible already at the time of marriage. For the most economically marginalized immigrants, however, an intermarriage premium arises within marriage implying that forming a union with a native triggers a more rapid earnings growth among them.

Previous research has shown considerable marriage premiums in earnings for men, but often penalties for women of being in a union. In this study we extend this research by analyzing how the age difference between spouses affects the earnings profiles by gender. As we follow people over time in advance as well as within their marriage, we can separate premarital from postmarital earnings movements. The data consist of information on annual earnings 1990–2009 for all Swedes born 1960–1974 (N = 926,219). The results indicate that age homogamy is related to higher earnings for both men and women, and that larger age differences are generally associated with lower union premiums, quite independently of which spouse is older. However, most of these results are explained by assortative mating, in which men and women with greater earnings potentials find partners of a similar age. Overall, the age difference between spouses seems to have a limited causal effect, if any, on individual earnings. (Less)

BACKGROUNDWe know a great deal about the historical fertility transition at the macro level. The dominating focus on the macro level in previous research on the fertility transition means, however, that to a large extent we lack knowledge about details of the decline and empirical tests of the leading explanatory frameworks.OBJECTIVEOur aim is to explore socioeconomic fertility differentials in an industrializing community, to gain insight about the details and discuss possible mechanisms. The study starts well before industrialization and finishes at the end of the transition.METHODWe use longitudinal individual-level data from the Scanian Economic-Demographic Database, which contains demographic as well as socioeconomic information, including occupation, landholding, and income. In the analysis we use hazard regressions with shared frailty at the family level.RESULTSThe transition involved not only parity-specific stopping but also spacing. While the upper social strata had higher fertility prior to the transition, they started to control their fertility earlier, by the 1880s, and also more consistently. Farmers, the middle class, and skilled workers followed in the decades after, and unskilled workers with some additional delay.CONCLUSIONSThese findings are partly inconsistent with several of the major explanations in the literature, such as mortality decline, increased female labor force participation, and a quantity-quality trade-off, but consistent with an innovation process where new ideas and attitudes about family limitation spread from the elite to other social groups.COMMENTSFurther studies are required to empirically test the innovation-diffusion theory.1. IntroductionOne of the major demographic changes during the past 200 years has been the emergence of the two-child norm as part of the creation of the modern family. In most parts of Western Europe this process started in the late nineteenth century and was completed by the 1930s. In Sweden marital fertility started to decline around 1880, and after about 50 years, total fertility had declined to below two children per woman (Hofsten and Lundstrom 1976). Since then completed fertility has remained quite stable at around two births per woman, despite large variations in birth rates, giving empirical support for the two-child ideal of modern families.We know a great deal about the historical fertility transition at the macro level. It was fairly simultaneous in Western Europe, France excluded, starting in the late nineteenth century, and earlier in urban areas than in rural. At the micro level we also know a great deal about fertility before the transition, but less on the transition itself, and even less integrating the pre-transitional period with the transition. We therefore still lack a fundamental understanding of the whole process of fertility decline (cf. Guinnane 2011). There has been much theorizing and generalization of empirical evidence around the fertility transition with a number of influential explanatory frameworks emerging. In most cases, however, the empirical support is rather weak. Examples include the quantity-quality trade-off, the cost-of-time hypotheses, and the innovation-diffusion hypothesis, as well as mortality decline as the main trigger of fertility decline. Sometimes the hypothesis in itself has been used to explain other outcomes, as in the case of the quantity-quality trade-off, which has been viewed as instrumental in the transition from preindustrial economic stagnation to modern economic growth (see Galor 2011).The aim of this paper is to look at fertility patterns by socioeconomic status before and during the fertility transition in order to gain new insights into the explanations of the transition. Rather than performing direct tests of different hypotheses about the transition, for which we lack sufficient data, we will discuss likely socioeconomic patterns that could be derived from the standard explanations, and put these to an empirical test using high-quality individual level data with information on socioeconomic status derived from occupation and land holding. …

Background: Despite a long interest in the historical fertility transition, there is still a lack of knowledge about disaggregated patterns that could help us understand the mechanisms behind the transition. In previous research the widely held view is that there was a change in the association between social status and fertility in conjunction with the fertility transition, implying that fertility went from being positively connected to social status (higher status was connected with higher fertility) to being negatively associated with fertility. Objective: The aim of this collection is to study socioeconomic patterns in the fertility transition in a variety of contexts using similar approaches and measures of socioeconomic status. Methods: All contributions use different kinds of micro-level socioeconomic and demographic data and statistical models in the analysis. Data either come from census-like records or population registers. Conclusions: There is no consistent evidence for the hypothesis that socioeconomic status was positively related to fertility before the demographic transition. While such a correlation was clearly present in some contexts it was clearly not in other contexts. There is more unanimous support for the idea that the upper-and middle classes acted as forerunners in the transition, while especially farmers were late to change their fertility behavior. It is also evident that both parity-specific stopping and prolonged birth intervals (spacing) were important in the fertility transition.

Several studies have shown strong educational homogamy in most Western societies, although the trends over time differ across countries. In this article, we study the connection between educational assortative mating and gender-specific earnings in a sample containing the entire Swedish population born 1960–1974; we follow this sample from 1990 to 2009. Our empirical strategy exploits a longitudinal design, using distributed fixed-effects models capturing the impact of partner education on postmarital earnings, relating it to the income development before union formation. We find that being partnered with someone with more education (hypergamy) is associated with higher earnings, while partnering someone with less education (hypogamy) is associated with lower earnings. However, most of these differences in earnings emerge prior to the time of marriage, implying that the effect is explained by marital selection processes rather than by partner education affecting earnings. The exception is hypogamy among the highly educated, for which there are strong indications that in comparison with homogamy and hypergamy, earnings grow slower after union formation.

The timings of historical fertility transitions in different regions are well understood by demographers, but much less is known regarding their specific features and causes. In the study reported in this paper, we used longitudinal micro-level data for five local populations in Europe and North America to analyse the relationship between socio-economic status and fertility during the fertility transition. Using comparable analytical models and class schemes for each population, we examined the changing socio-economic differences in marital fertility and related these to common theories on fertility behaviour. Our results do not provide support for the hypothesis of universally high fertility among the upper classes in pre-transitional society, but do support the idea that the upper classes acted as forerunners by reducing their fertility before other groups. Farmers and unskilled workers were the latest to start limiting their fertility. Apart from these similarities, patterns of class differences in fertility varied significantly between populations.

Most existing studies on the fertility transition focus either on macro-level trends or on micro-level patterns with limited geographic scope. Much less attention has been given to the interplay between individual characteristics and contextual conditions, including geographic location. This paper contributes to closing this research gap. We investigate the relevance of geography and socioeconomic status (SES) for understanding fertility variation in the initial phase of the fertility decline in Sweden. Spatially-sensitive multi-level analyses are applied to study fertility trends by SES and parish, using full-count individual-level census data for 1880, 1890, and 1900. Our results show that the elite not only constituted the vanguard group in the fertility decline, but that the shift in fertility behavior occurred quickly among this social class in virtually all parts of Sweden. Other social classes experienced the decline with some delay in both central and peripheral areas, and their patterns of decline were more clustered in and around the early centers of the decline compared to the pattern of the elite. Long-distance migrants, who were disproportionately represented among the elite and who initially had higher fertility, were among the pioneers in the process. This suggests that factors such as social connectedness through space and local social embeddedness were important in determining the early adoption of changes in fertility behavior. Our results confirm the view that social status and social class boundaries were of considerable relevance in structuring the fertility transition. The importance of space for understanding variation in the fertility decline seems to be negatively correlated with social status, with the pattern of decline among the elite showing the lowest degree of spatial variation.

BACKGROUNDAlthough demographers have long been interested in studying the historical fertility transition, there is still a lack of knowledge about disaggregated patterns. Identifying these patterns could help us to better understand the mechanisms behind the transition.OBJECTIVEThe aim of this paper is to explore social class differentials in fertility before, during, and after the fertility decline, in order to test hypotheses regarding a reversal of class differences during the transition.METHODWe use micro-level census data for Sweden 1880, 1890, 1900, 1960, and 1970 with individual-level information on occupation, which is used to measure class. Poisson regressions with parish-level fixed effects enable us to carefully control spatial heterogeneity in measuring class differences in net fertility (child-woman ratios).RESULTSThe relative differences were about as large in the early phases of the transition as they were in the 1960s. The fertility levels of the high-fertility classes were about 40% higher than those of the low-fertility classes. In the early phases of the decline, the upper and middle classes had much lower net fertility than lower skilled workers, who had the highest fertility levels. However, there was no clear gradient from the highest to the lowest socioeconomic status. Instead, it appears that the upper and middle classes had low fertility levels, while the fertility levels of the remaining groups were unchanged, and therefore remained relatively high. In the 1960s, members of the middle class had the lowest fertility levels, while farmers and rural laborers had the highest fertility levels.CONCLUSIONSThe results only partly confirm the assumption that there was a reversal in class differences in the demographic transition. Class was found to be important, but the pattern was not characterized by a simple gradient. Moreover, spatial heterogeneity was shown to explain about half of the observed differences between classes. The observed pattern suggests that the fertility transition can be attributed to both innovation-diffusion and the adjustment to new socioeconomic conditions.(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)1. IntroductionThe decline of fertility in the demographic transition has been a major theme in historical demography for some time. Much of the literature focusing on the demographic aspects of the decline has sought to chart the process without actually explaining it. Other studies have offered explanations for the decline mainly at the macro level, identifying either innovation or adjustment processes as the main causal agents. Scholars have shown less interest in examining disaggregated patterns using micro-level analyses.One of the main issues that arises in discussions of the fertility decline is the extent to which fertility levels differ according to socioeconomic status, and how these differences evolved over the fertility transition. Most demographers appear to agree that having higher social status was associated with having higher fertility prior to the transition, but that this situation reversed during the transition, or even before it occurred (Livi-Bacci 1986; Skirbekk 2008). While it is therefore often assumed that higher social groups were forerunners in the decline (Haines 1992; Livi-Bacci 1986), the question of whether the change happened because new incentives were affecting the elite groups first (adjustment), or if it came about as a result of a diffusion of new ideas first adopted in these high-status groups (innovation), remains unresolved (see Haines 1992).As some of the differences in fertility levels between socioeconomic groups may have also been related to spatial differences in socioeconomic structure, rather than to social status as such (Garrett et al. 2001); it is essential that researchers control for the spatial aspect when analyzing socioeconomic stratification and fertility in national populations (see also Szreter 1996). …

RésuméDans toute l’Europe préindustrielle, le domaine manorial était une institution importante de l’économie rurale. Il est une vue largement répandue dans les textes publiés sur le sujet selon laquelle le propriétaire du domaine garantissait les paysans locataires contre les imprévus, par exemple dans les temps de difficulté économique. En distribuant des céréales, ou en acceptant de déférer le paiement de la rente, les seigneurs des domaines aidaient à réduire les effets de la faim dans les périodes de pénurie. Si cette forme d’assurance s’était avérée efficace, alors les paysans locataires des domaines auraient dû subir des fluctuations moins importantes que les autres paysans dans leur revenu ou leur alimentation. On ne rencontre que peu de confirmations empiriques du fait que les domaines de l’ère préindustrielle eussent de fait fourni une assurance de ce type. Cet article utilise l’impact du prix des céréales sur la démographie pour mesurer l’efficacité du système manorial à protéger ses sujets contre le stress économique. En examinant 400 paroisses de Suède (1749-1849), on peut constater que le domaine manorial pouvait certes assurer ses habitants contre les risques de stress économique, mais que l’effet de protection était finalement très imparfait et observable uniquement dans le court terme.

Throughout pre-industrial Europe, the manorial estate was an important institution in the rural economy. Related literature communicates the widespread view that the estates insured their tenants against uncertainties, for example, in times of economic hardship. By distributing grain or accepting deferment of rents, the manors helped to alleviate hunger in times of scarcity. If this insurance was indeed effective, then manorial tenants should have experienced less fluctuation in income or food availability than other peasants. However, there has not been much empirical confirmation that the pre-industrial estates were effective in providing this kind of insurance. This study uses the impact of grain prices on demographic outcomes as a measure of the efficiency of the manorial system in protecting its inhabitants against economic stress. Looking at four hundred parishes in Sweden (1749-1859), the manorial estate seems to have been able to insure its inhabitants against risks of economic stress, but the protective effect was imperfect and only visible in the short term.

In much of preindustrial Europe, the manorial estate was an important institution in the rural economy. Despite a widespread view that the estates insured its tenants against uncertainties, there is little evidence that measures taken were efficient. This study uses the impact of grain prices on demographic outcomes as a measure of the efficiency of the manorial system in protecting its inhabitants against economic stress. Looking at four hundred parishes in southern Sweden (1749-1859), the manorial estate seems to have been able to insure its inhabitants against risks of economic stress, but the protective effect was highly imperfect, and only short term. Copyright , Oxford University Press.