An abundant demographic literature examines the impacts of climatic and environmental change on human migration and health. However, somewhat less is known about the effects of environmental changes, especially flood events, on fertility despite plausible reasons to expect such impacts. We address this gap by examining the relationship between exposure to flooding and fertility in Bangladesh, which has experienced several catastrophic flood events in recent decades. We link birth records from the Demographic and Health Survey with satellite-derived measures of flooding from 2001 through 2018 and fit regression models to measure the effects of flood exposures on the probability of live births in subsequent years. To explore pathways, we also construct and analyze panels of women's entry into first marriage and mortality among under-5 children. Flooding has uneven effects on fertility across the target population. We detect statistically and substantively meaningful flood-related increases in childbearing among less-educated and higher-parity women; but find flood-related fertility declines among childless women and those in urban areas. Results also suggest that flood-related delays in marriage among urban women may explain their reductions in fertility. However, findings otherwise provide little systematic evidence that marriage and child mortality mediate the links between flood exposures and fertility.

The extent to which women outlive men in the U.S. has fluctuated over the 20th century, with periods of equalization, stagnation, and increase. Women's life expectancy advantage declined for roughly four decades but resurged after 2012. This coincided with an increase in deaths of despair (deaths due to suicide, alcohol, and drugs), for which rates are higher among men than women. We decompose the gender gap in life expectancy from 1979 to 2022 in the U.S. by cause of death and find that deaths of despair explain the vast majority of the resurgence of women's life expectancy advantage since 2012, while its contribution to trends before 2012 is small relative to cardiovascular disease, lung cancer, and other causes of death. Drug-related mortality drives almost all of the post-2012 growth for White, Black, and Hispanic Americans alike, although its contribution is much higher for those without a college degree. Over the longer term, we show that deaths of despair have significantly offset the equalization of the gender gap in life expectancy since 1979. Our paper contributes to the literature by providing new evidence on the role of anomic social processes as recent drivers of gender disparities in life expectancy.

In recent years, US life expectancy has stagnated relative to other developed countries and geographic inequalities in mortality within the United States have widened. Much of the recent literature has focused on non-Hispanic White mortality. Less attention has been devoted to non-Hispanic Black mortality independent of Black-White disparities. In this paper, we examine trends in non-Hispanic Black male and female life expectancy between 1990 and 2019 by metropolitan category and region/division, including age-group and cause-of-death contributions to these trends. We document considerable geographic divergence in life expectancy over time with the largest improvements in large central and large fringe metropolitan areas and smallest improvements in small/medium metros and nonmetropolitan areas. We also document sizable differences across regions, with the largest gains in the Northeast and the South Atlantic region and the smallest in other parts of the South and the Midwest. Most gains were achieved by 2010 with stagnating or declining life expectancies thereafter. We find particularly adverse trends in the Midwest after 2010 where Black life expectancies declined in all metro categories. We provide a discussion of the potential explanatory factors and call for greater attention to the study of non-Hispanic Black mortality.

We evaluate the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic for preterm birth in Mexico using microdata that include all births from 2014 to 2022. The country's hybrid public/private healthcare system allows us to examine how women's adaptive behaviors to the health crisis shaped their birth outcomes. The proportion of women giving birth in private hospitals increased dramatically after the onset of the pandemic in March 2020. This was likely a strategy to reduce their risk of infection in public hospitals, many of which were overcrowded. Time-series models suggest that preterm births increased among women who gave birth in public hospitals but decreased among women who gave birth in private settings. Difference-in-differences models based on a conception-cohort design with hospital fixed-effects indicate that the health benefits from receiving private rather than public care were concentrated among women with higher levels of education. The reduction in preterm births among more educated women was partially explained by their choice of higher quality services within the private sector and by changes in the demographic composition of patients who chose private care. Our analysis illustrates how protective behaviors subject to heterogeneous socioeconomic and structural constraints may lead to unequal health outcomes during health emergencies.

Family networks are key to understanding the wellbeing of older adults because kin provide instrumental and financial support, help manage health and disability, and encourage social integration. Two momentous societal changes have shaped the families of contemporary older adults: the first and second demographic transitions and global educational expansion. The intersection of these two processes raises questions about how older adults are faring in terms of their kin availability. This paper examines the socioeconomic bifurcation of adults in midlife and beyond in terms of the existence of descendants and other kin. Disparities in kin availability may vary across socioeconomic status and contexts, and so we examine this phenomenon worldwide, analyzing data on two thirds of the world's population of adults aged 50 and above. Our results highlight different kin structures by socioeconomic status. High socioeconomic status adults have fewer descendants but a higher likelihood of having at least one child with tertiary education, a partner, and living parents. Low socioeconomic status older adults have larger families with more younger kin. Our results shed new light on potential mismatches between the contemporary family networks of older adults and longstanding social norms and assumptions about caregiving, family, and health policies.

Although the globalization of international migration is commonly accepted as a general tendency in contemporary migration patterns (de Haas, Castles, and Miller 2020, 9), the corresponding body of empirical evidence is mixed and fragmented. Our review of global migration patterns over the past half-century highlights how the theories, expectations, and ultimately findings may vary depending on the specific definitions, vantage points, and measures being used. In this paper, we provide a simpler and integrated account of the globalization of international migration that includes a corresponding empirical template to quantify the relative importance of two processes at work: the intensity and connectivity of international migration. Using recent estimates of country-to-country migration flows every five years from 1990-1995 to 2015-2020, our analysis using demographic decomposition and group-based multitrajectory modeling highlights the dynamic relationship between intensity and connectivity from both the global and country vantage points. Our work in this paper provides a starting point in the form of a much-needed empirical template, one that is also highly flexible and customizable, for future research on the globalization of international migration to coalesce around and use going forward.

Despite declines in child mortality rates, experiencing a child death remains a common feature of motherhood in many contemporary African populations. Yet, we lack population insights into the consequences of child death for mothers' well-being in the high-mortality regions where it concentrates. Contrasting an extensive psychology literature on the severe and long-lasting consequences of child death for parents in low-mortality settings, a long-standing thesis in multiple social science literature is that the normativity of child death in high-mortality settings can lead to a numbing effect-muting parents' reactions to child loss. Yet, select anthropological accounts challenge this thesis, arguing instead that child death can also bear notable consequences for bereaved parents in communities where it is common. This study brings population data to bear, analyzing two representative samples of women in Balaka, Malawi, to examine if child death has measurable mental health consequences for mothers, including elevated and/or worsening depressive symptoms. Further, the study explores the potential influence of children's near-death experiences on mothers. The results offer evidence that child loss-and the ever-present threat of it-are underappreciated drivers of women's poor mental health, and overall well-being.

Fertility desires are fundamental to understanding contraceptive use, yet the relationship between the two remains unclear and is the subject of much debate in demography. To understand the macro-level relationship between fertility desires and contraceptive transition in low- and middle-income countries, we introduce a conceptual model that articulates the micro-level processes through which a desire to avoid childbearing translates into contraceptive use and reasons for their frequent misalignment. The model calls for a more nuanced understanding of fertility desires, differentiates between the acceptability and accessibility of contraception, and highlights the multilevel forces that shape the costs of fertility regulation. These micro-level processes are key to understanding the evolving role of changes in fertility desires and changes in the implementation of desires on contraceptive transition across time and space. We conclude these relationships are additive, multiplicative, and dynamic over time.

Stock estimates of the US unauthorized foreign-born population are routinely published, but less is known about this population's dynamics. Using a series of residual estimates based on 2000 Census and 2001-2022 American Community Survey (ACS), I estimate the components of change for the unauthorized immigrant population from 2000 to 2022 by region and country of origin. Further, I develop and present novel measures of expected duration in unauthorized status and demographic impact of unauthorized entries (i.e., person-years lived in unauthorized status). Results reveal dramatic changes over the last two decades. In the early 2000s, the unauthorized immigrant population was dominated by Mexicans who tended to remain in the United States for extended periods of time and whose demographic impact on the US population was substantial. After the 2007-2008 Great Recession, a new pattern emerged. Unauthorized migrants now arrive from across the globe, including Central America and Asia (up through 2018), and most recently from Europe, Africa, Canada, Venezuela, and other parts of South America. These new unauthorized immigrants are more likely to arrive on temporary nonimmigrant visas (which typically allow a foreigner to live and work in the United States for six years) and, with the exception of Venezuelans, spend less time in unauthorized status. Overall, the demographic impact of this new type of unauthorized migration is lower than it was two decades ago.

This paper focuses on age restrictions on access to infertility treatments and eligibility for their public reimbursement, exploring their relevancy in contexts of rising late birth rates (40+). I explore how age-based reimbursement policies for in vitro fertilization treatments have responded to these fertility trends in 27 high-income countries and in which regulatory frameworks for medically assisted reproduction (MAR) very late births (45+) have particularly increased. First, I show that while age limits for treatment reimbursement are well aligned with the prevalence of late fertility in some national contexts, in most countries, strict age restrictions are lagging behind the rise in late births. In others, pronatalist policies have prompted permissive age criteria or law revisions, anticipating or adapting to rising trends in late births. Second, the rise in very late births has been limited in some contexts with strict age-based rules. However, the analysis suggests that the impact of MAR on very late births may also be influenced by contextual factors other than regulations.

The worldwide expansion of female educational opportunities in recent decades has prompted demographers to assess the frequency with which women marry up (hypergamy) or down (hypogamy) with regard to education. A series of articles documented dramatic and nearly universal declines in hypergamy over time and across female educational advantage. However, this previous work investigated hypergamy only in the context of unequal educational pairings, excluding couples with equal levels of education (homogamy) from their analysis. Here, we argue that the prevalence of hypergamy should instead be assessed in relation to marriages. We apply this approach to the case of Latin America, where women have made important gains in schooling relative to men. Using census microdata spanning 105 birth cohorts in 16 countries, we demonstrate that, rather than declining, hypergamy has in most countries over time and remains relatively stable across female educational advantage. Meanwhile, the prevalence of educational homogamy has declined considerably in most countries and across the axis of female educational advantage, an important trend that emerges only when homogamy is incorporated into the analysis.

Recognizing the prolonged, uneven, and evolving nature of the Covid-19 pandemic, this study provides one of the first dynamic, multilevel perspectives of women's fertility intentions in response to the pandemic and its multifaceted impacts. We examine how evolving individual- and community-level Covid-19 risk mechanisms and socioeconomic and life-course conditions are associated with continuity and change in women's fertility intentions. We combine individual-level panel data from a population-based sample of women aged 18-34 in Pernambuco, Brazil in 2020 and 2021 with corresponding administrative data from 94 municipalities. We use multinomial logit regressions to model continuity and change in fertility intentions across waves. We then estimate fixed effect models to highlight the time-varying determinants of changing fertility intentions while accounting for unobserved, time-invariant individual factors. We find that high and/or increasing individual and community-level Covid-19 exposure is associated with a greater likelihood of abandoning initial childbearing plans and a greater likelihood to maintain intentions to forego versus to intend having additional children. We advance the literature by highlighting how individual-level Covid-19 infection risk perceptions matter for fertility intentions, net of community-level exposure, and the necessity of dynamic perspectives for understanding how fertility intentions have changed (or not) in response to the pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic was accompanied by social and economic changes previously associated with fertility delay and reduction, sparking widespread discussion of a "baby bust" in the U.S. We examine fertility trends using restricted vital statistics data from California, a diverse population of 40 million contributing 12% of U.S. births. Using time series models that account for longer-run fertility trends, we observe modest, short-term reductions in births from mid 2020 through early 2021. Birth counts in subsequent months matched or even eased the pace of fertility decline since the 2008 recession and are unlikely a function of the pandemic alone. Responses to the pandemic were heterogeneous. Fertility declined markedly among the foreign-born population, largely driven by changes in net migration. Among the U.S.-born population, the short-term pandemic-attributable reductions were largest among older, highly educated people, suggesting mechanisms of fertility reduction disparately accessible to those with the most resources. We find no evidence of a strong population fertility response to the pandemic's accompanying employment shock, providing additional evidence of a growing divide between macroeconomic conditions and fertility patterns in the U.S.

Women in Africa may have experienced conflicting pressures during the COVID-19 pandemic. While the unpredictable nature of the pandemic was prompting some women to delay pregnancies, the pandemic was potentially limiting access to reproductive health services due to supply shortages, fears of virus exposure, and mobility restrictions. In this study, we used longitudinal data from Kenya and Burkina Faso and applied a multilevel perspective to better understand the factors contributing to change or persistence in contraceptive use during the early months of the pandemic. We found a marginal increase in contraceptive uptake in the early days of the pandemic. Multilevel logistic regression results revealed that interpersonal trust and accurate knowledge of COVID-19 precautions were associated with a greater likelihood of initiating contraception. These factors appeared to have provided women with confidence to navigate the complicated COVID-19 landscape. At the same time, we observed a decrease in contraceptive use in regions with high COVID-19 cases, suggesting the virus was limiting access to contraception in some contexts. These findings highlighted the need for public health officials to ensure that women have the necessary knowledge and ability to safely access contraception during public health crises, when overall demand for contraception may be increasing.

The effects of climate change on human migration have received widespread attention, driven in part by concerns about potential large-scale population displacements. Recent studies demonstrate that climate-migration linkages are often complex, and climatic variability may increase, decrease, or have null effects on migration. However, the use of noncomparable analytic strategies across studies makes it difficult to disentangle substantive variation in climate effects across populations and places from methodological artifacts. We address this gap by using harmonized census and survey microdata from six Asian countries (n = 54,987,838) to measure climate effects on interprovincial migration, overall and among subpopulations defined by age, sex, education, and country of residence. We also evaluate whether climate effects differ according to the distance and type of move. Exposure to precipitation deficits leads to substantively large reductions in out-migration, and, surprisingly, these overall effects do not vary meaningfully by age, sex, or educational attainment. However, there are significant differences in the strength and direction of temperature and precipitation effects by country and within countries. Multinomial models show that precipitation deficits reduce internal migration to both adjacent and nonadjacent provinces. Finally, consistent with expectations that climate effects operate through economic mechanisms, spells of low precipitation reduce the probability of work-related moves in the countries where the reason for migration is measured. Our findings provide further evidence that adverse environmental conditions can reduce migration, underlining the need for policymakers to consider how to support both displaced and trapped populations.

The disparity in life expectancy between white and black Americans exceeds five years for men and three years for women. While prior research has investigated the roles of healthcare, health behaviors, biological risk, socioeconomic status, and life course effects on black mortality, the literature on the geographic origins of the gap is more limited. This study examines how the black-white life expectancy gap varies across counties and how much of the national gap is attributable to within-county racial inequality versus differences between counties. The estimates suggest that over 90% of the national gap can be attributed to within-county factors. Using a quasi-experimental research design, I find that black-white residential segregation increases the gap by approximately 16 years for men and five years for women. The segregation effect loads heavily on causes of death associated with access to and quality of healthcare; safety and violence; and public health measures. Residential segregation does not appear to operate through health behaviors or individual-level factors, but instead acts primarily through institutional mechanisms. Efforts to address racial disparities in mortality should focus on reducing racial residential segregation or reducing inequalities in the mechanisms through which residential segregation acts: public services, employment opportunities, and community resources.

Demographers have long been interested in how fertility ideals vary in response to perceived existential threats. Although migration scholars document the increasingly threatening nature of U.S. immigration policies, little research explores how these policies shape the fertility ideals of those most affected by them. To that end, we exploit spatiotemporal variation in states' evolving immigrant policy contexts to understand the effects of different policies on the ideal family size of Hispanics-a group who is most likely to be stereotyped as undocumented and most likely to live in mixed-status households or communities. Specifically, we combine time-varying information on state-level immigrant policies with georeferenced data from the General Social Survey (GSS). Results suggest that the gap in ideal family size between Hispanic and white respondents is significantly larger in state-years with omnibus policies-which bundle multiple restrictive laws together and thus impose sweeping restrictions- compared to state-years without these policies. On the other hand, sanctuary policies, which aim to curb federal immigration enforcement, and E-verify mandates, which aim to curb the employment of undocumented immigrants, are not associated with significant differences. Our analyses provide new insights into the complex ways in which the evolving U.S. immigrant policy landscape has far-reaching impacts on reproductive and family life.

Individuals age at vastly different rates resulting in significant within-population heterogeneity in health and aging outcomes. This diversity in health and aging trajectories has rarely been investigated among low-income aging populations that have experienced substantial hardships throughout their lifecourses. Utilizing 2006-2018 data from the Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health (MLSFH) and estimating group-based trajectory models (GBTM), our analyses identified three distinct lifecourse health trajectories: (1) comparatively good initial mental and physical health that persisted throughout the lifecourse ("resilient aging"); (2) relatively good initial mental and physical health that started to deteriorate during mid-adulthood ("accelerated aging"); and (3) poor initial mental and physical health that further declined over the lifecourse ("aging with persistently poor health"). For both physical and mental health, men were more likely to enjoy resilient aging than women. Predictors other than gender of trajectory membership sometimes confirmed, and sometimes contradicted, hypotheses derived from high-income country studies. Our analyses highlight the long arm of early life conditions and gender in determining aging trajectories and show that a non-trivial sub-population is characterized by aging with persistently poor health. The study uncovers widening gaps in health outcomes between those who age with resilience and those who experience accelerated aging.

The U.S. Census has grappled with public concerns about privacy since the first enumeration in 1790. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, census officials began responding to concerns about privacy with promises of confidentiality. In recent years, escalating concerns about confidentiality have threatened to reduce the usability of publicly accessible population data. This paper traces the history of privacy and disclosure control since 1790. We argue that controlling public access to census information has never been an effective response to public concerns about government intrusion. We conclude that the Census Bureau should weigh the costs of curtailing access to reliable data against realistic measures of the benefit of new approaches to disclosure control.

The United States has experienced a sustained fertility decline, with those currently in their childbearing years facing unique constraints. Drawing from the Theory of Conjunctural Action and the Narratives of the Future framework, this work considers how objective and subjective socioeconomic conditions, psychosocial characteristics, and perceptions of well-being are linked to mothers' and childless women's (a) prospective fertility intentions during the Great Recession, (b) realization of those intentions in the post-Recession period, and (c) fertility intentions toward the end of the reproductive years, using Waves IV and V of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. The results confirm the role of standard socioeconomic measures and also highlight the importance of subjective measures. In general, more advantaged women were more likely to intend to have (more) children at both waves and to have children between waves. Furthermore, women who already had children by the Great Recession were more likely than their childless peers to have a(nother) child in the post-Recession period. As this cohort approaches the end of its childbearing years, having unfulfilled fertility plans from earlier in the reproductive life course is a strong predictor of continuing to intend at least one birth.