April 27, 2004 | News

Happy Birthday to Jan Hoem

The employees of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research as well as researchers from abroad held a conference on Contemporary Research on European Fertility: Perspectives and Developments on the occasion of Jan M. Hoem's 65th birthday.

James W. Vaupel, Founding Director of the Institute, opened the conference and said:
"Before Jan Hoem, demography was deterministic. In good part because of Jan's research contributions and consistent insistence, good demographers now ground their research in the methods and concepts of probability and statistics. In particular, intensity regression and event-history analysis are now the preferred strategies for many kinds of demographic analysis. Jan deserves great credit for this. Over the past four and a half years Jan has made another major contribution, as Director and now Executive Director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research."

Then researchers presented studies dealing with fertility development. In particular, they focused on how important social, economic, cultural, and institutional influences are on fertility - both individually and in combination with one other. The papers presented at this conference have been published in a special collection of the online-journal Demographic Research.

Congratulations: James W. Vaupel opened the conference.	Skål, Prost, Cheers: Jan M. Hoem at his birthday party together with colleagues.

International: Among the guests at the conference were researchers from Germany, Norway, Sweden, Belgium, Italy and the United States.

Surprise: James W. Vaupel and Renée Flibotte-Lüskow presented the special collection of the online-journal Demographic Research.