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March 03, 2023

US Mortality: New Measure Reveals Large Mortality Inequality

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Researchers at the MPIDR and University of Wisconsin-Madison developed a new measure called GAP to assess contemporary mortality inequality in the US across racial-ethnic groups. They find that current estimates based on standard metrics such as life expectancy underestimate racial-ethnic disparities in mortality. more

February 28, 2023

Migration of Academics Worldwide: Women in Science Are Less Mobile but the Gender Gap has Shrunk

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An international team including MPIDR Researchers is the first to offer a global and dynamic view on the migration of academics by gender. The paper recently published in PNAS finds that while female researchers were less internationally mobile than men, the gender gap has shrunk considerably over the past 20 years. more

February 17, 2023

Parents in Germany: What Role does Personality Play in the Decision to Have Children?

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Personality traits such as agreeableness, conscientiousness, and extraversion affect the probability of having children. MPIDR doctoral student Steffen Peters demonstrates this in his new study using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel study. more

February 03, 2023

Life in a Violent Country can be Years Shorter and Much Less Predictable – Even for Those Not Involved in Conflict

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How long people live is less predictable and life expectancy for young people can be as much as 14 years shorter in violent countries compared to peaceful countries, according to a new study from an international team, including MPIDR Researchers. It reveals a direct link between the uncertainty of living in a violent setting, even for those not directly involved in the violence, and a ‘double burden’ of shorter and less predictable lives. more

January 23, 2023

Most Women in Sub-Saharan Africa Re-marry Quickly after Divorce or Widowhood, Even Though Re-Marriage Rates are Declining

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Two researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock, Germany analyzed union dissolution in 34 sub-Saharan African countries over the past four decades by applying indirect demographic techniques in a novel way to overcome the lack of data. more

January 19, 2023

Migration of Academics: Economic Development Does Not Necessarily Lead to Brain Drain

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A team of researchers from the Laboratory of Digital and Computational Demography at the MPIDR produced a database that contains the number of academics per country, and the migration flows and rates from 1996 to 2021. They also analyzed the relationship between emigration and economic development per country. Their findings indicate that the patterns for the migration of academics may be widely different from the population-level ones, not necessarily leading to brain-drain. more

January 17, 2023

Perceived Fairness

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The world of a couple changes fundamentally after childbirth. Whether the partners are as satisfied with their relationship then as they were during their childless phase hinges in part on how fair they perceive the division of labor to be. If women consider the work load as stable unfair, their relationship satisfaction drops markedly after the birth of a child. This does not apply to men, however. more

December 15, 2022

USA: Less Educated Spend Less Time in Retirement

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MPIDR PhD Student Jiaxin Shi and his co-authors modeled later-life work dynamics in the US using longitudinal survey data to show how much the timespan spent in retirement differs between educational groups. more

November 17, 2022

USA: Being Obese in Early Adulthood Increases the Chance of Remaining Childless at 40 and beyond

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A team of researchers used longitudinal survey data from the late 1950s US birth cohort to show how sex and ethnicity relate to how weight (BMI) during early adulthood predicts later childlessness. The study was recently published in the journal “Population Studies”. more

November 07, 2022

Is Facebook’s Advertising Data Accurate Enough for Use in Social Science?

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Researchers of the Digital and Computational Demography Lab at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) and colleagues recently published a paper in the “Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A” which systematically assesses the quality of Facebook’s ads data for use in social science research. They assessed the accuracy of this data by comparing self-reported and Facebook-classified demographic information on sex, age and region of residence of more than 133,000 users recruited via an online survey. Their results suggest that Facebook’s ads data can be used when additional steps are taken to validate the accuracy of the information under consideration.  more

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The Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock is one of the leading demographic research centers in the world. It's part of the Max Planck Society, the internationally renowned German research society.