Declining birth rates and rising life expectancy are reshaping the size and age structure of families worldwide. A recent study reveals that the question is not only whether these changes will occur, but also how quickly they will unfold. Analyses of real population data from Thailand, Indonesia, Ghana and Nigeria as well as stylized scenarios confirm this trend. In countries undergoing rapid demographic change, people with an age difference of only five to ten years may have drastically different kinship networks. More
July
08
Hampton Gaddy from the London School of Economics gives a talk. More
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In the US, the later you retire, the higher your monthly pension benefit will be. Researchers have investigated whether this is optimal, given the uncertainties surrounding life expectancy. The results show that delaying retirement poses a particular financial risk to men and low-income groups, and that different decisions are necessary depending on individual circumstances and uncertainty. More
Leesch, J.; Skopek, J.:
Five decades of marital sorting in France and the United States: the role of educational expansion and the changing gender imbalance in education Research in Social Stratification and Mobility 97:101044, 1–15. (2025)
Akbaritabar, A.; Castro Torres, A. F.; Larivière, V.:
A global perspective on social stratification in science Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 11:914, 1–10. (2024)
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Can we predict Steph Curry’s next move on the court? Last year, Boris Barron started at MPIDR as a research scientist in the Migration and Mobility Department. He is a physicist and specializes in modeling complex systems. While at Cornell University, he and his colleagues developed a methodology to analyze detailed positional information of basketball players in NBA games. Their approach adapted a physics-based approach, Density Functional Fluctuation Theory (DFFT), to provide a general framework to infer subtle aspects of the game. More