Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research

We study the structure and dynamics of populations and explore issues of political relevance, such as aging, fertility, and the redistribution of work over the life course, as well as digitization and the use of new data sources for the estimation of migration flows.

January 15, 2026

Important Relatives

Family research usually focuses on the nuclear family, i.e. the father, mother and children. Relationships with other relatives have hardly been studied to date. Yet these relationships play an important role. More

January

Scientific Presentations

LabTalks@SocialDemography

Christian Dudel, leader of the Research Group: Labor Demography and Wen Su, postdoctoral researcher at the Leverhulme Center for Demographic Science, give a talk. More

All Events

Call for Abstracts

Second International Workshop on Life Course Analysis

Recommended Readings | January 21, 2026

Married Female Couples at Highest Risk of Divorce

Introduction to our research groups

Fertility and Well-Being

Letter to the Editor PNAS | December 16, 2025

Migration fell during the pandemic, but not in the ways we think

MPIDR researcher Jordan Klein publishes Letter to the Editor in PNAS. A recent PNAS study uses Facebook data to estimate monthly international migration flows worldwide. The authors report that global migration fell sharply during the COVID-19 pandemic, declining by an estimated 64 percent in 2020, driven in part by the imposition of border controls, before rebounding strongly in 2022. Klein, together with Ingmar Weber have now published a Letter to the Editor in PNAS that brings these findings into conversation with the work of Chi et al. More

Selected Publications

Dierker, P.; Kühn, M.; Myrskylä, M.:

Re-partnering and single mothers' mental health and life satisfaction trajectories MPIDR Working Paper WP-2023-001. (2023)

Gueltzow, M.; Oude Groeniger, J.; Bijlsma, M. J.; Jansen , P. W.; Houweling, T. A. J.; van Lenthe, F. J.:

Childhood obesity's influence on socioeconomic disparities in young adolescents’ mental health Annals of Epidemiology 94, 19–26. (2024)

More Publications

New Issue 4/2025 available | December 18, 2025

The Quarterly German Newsletter

New articles every week

Questions and Answers

Being a Researcher at the MPIDR

Working at MPIDR

Life & Research in Rostock

Jobs & Fellowships

Press Release | August 26, 2025

Cohort Life Expectancy is no Longer Rising as Quickly

Open Access

Online Available Books

Press Release | April 02, 2025

Low Fertility and Economic Sustainability

Gaza | November 25, 2025

Study Reveals Unprecedented Losses of Life and Life Expectancy

A research team from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) and the Centre for Demographic Studies (CED) investigated the impact of the ongoing conflict in Gaza on mortality. They estimate that 78,318 (70,614-87,504) people were killed in Gaza between October 7, 2023 and December 31, 2024. As a result, life expectancy in Gaza in 2024 fell to nearly half the level expected without the war. An update of their analysis, produced after the publication of the study, revealed that the current violent death toll likely exceeds 100,000. More