September 30, 2026 | News | News

New Horizon Europe Project LIFe Traces Inequalities Across Lives and Generations

In a nutshell

€3.5 million, 4 years, 8 partners: LIFe brings together research and policy-analysis institutions across Europe to study how life chances develop over time and across generations.
MPIDR will lead demographic and health modelling: Emilio Zagheni’s Department of Digital and Computational Demography will model how fertility, migration, health and family structures shape people’s life paths
Evidence for long-term policy decisions: LIFe will provide policymakers with evidence and tools to assess intergenerational fairness and how demographic change and policy choices may affect people across generations

People of different ages playing tug of war

Intergenerational fairness goes beyond young versus old: LIFe looks at how advantages and disadvantages build up over a lifetime. © iStockphoto.com / Wavebreakmedia

A child born to financially secure parents with good access to education has a different start in life from a child of the same age growing up with fewer resources. Both may also face very different conditions from people born decades earlier. But how much should the circumstances we are born into — as individuals and as members of a generation—shape where we end up as adults and set off domino effects that can last a lifetime?

Funded with around €3.5 million through Horizon Europe, LIFe (Intergenerational Fairness: A Life-Course Approach) will develop tools to examine how advantages and disadvantages build up over entire lives. LIFe is carried out by a consortium of research and policy-analysis institutions across Europe, with MPIDR taking a leading role in modelling demographic and health developments.

MPIDR brings computational demography to LIFe

“LIFe takes a life-course approach. Rather than comparing generations at a single point in time, as if we were looking at snapshots, we want to understand how advantages and disadvantages develop over the life course and across generations,” explains Emilio Zagheni, Director at MPIDR, and Head of the Department of Digital and Computational Demography. “And we also consider the fiscal sustainability of demographic trends, and the role of policies.”

Two people born in the same year and country can have different levels of education, more or less stable employment, or periods of unpaid care. At the same time, both experience broader changes that affect their generation: they may live longer than their grandparents, grow up amid lower birth rates or changing migration patterns, and see policies on pensions, work or care change during their lives. LIFe aims to capture how these individual paths interact with wider demographic and societal change, combining a micro perspective on individual lives with a macro perspective on generations as a whole.

Zagheni’s department will bring its expertise in computational demography, including in predictive models and microsimulation, to the project. The team will model how fertility, migration, health and family structures may develop over time and test how different demographic trends or policy choices could change people’s life paths.

Evidence and tools for decision-makers

From the outset, LIFe is intended to be useful beyond academia. The project launches shortly after the European Commission adopted its first Strategy on Intergenerational Fairness in March 2026. The partners combine expertise from different disciplines and countries and will develop comparative, open-source tools that can remain in use after the project ends.

An Intergenerational Fairness Atlas, for example, will make it possible to compare developments across countries, while an open-source simulation toolkit will allow different demographic and policy scenarios to be explored. The project aims to create long-term tools that can be reused and adapted to examine how different choices and developments may play out over time.

Ultimately, LIFe aims to give policymakers a stronger evidence base for decisions whose consequences unfold over decades. Policy labs, survey experiments and stakeholder dialogues will bring researchers together with potential users so that the project’s methods and results are discussed and tested beyond academic circles.