MPIDR Working Paper

Boom, echo, pulse, flow: 385 years of Swedish births

Riffe, T., Barclay, K. J., Klüsener, S., Bohk-Ewald, C.

MPIDR Working Paper WP-2019-002, 29 pages.
Rostock, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (January 2019)
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DOI:10.4054/MPIDR-WP-2019-002

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Open Access

Reproducible

Abstract

Human population renewal starts with births. Since births can happen at any time in the year and over a wide range of ages, demographers typically imagine the birth series as a continuous flow. Taking this construct literally, we visualize the Swedish birth series as a flow. A long birth series allows us to juxtapose the children born in a particular year with the children that they in turn had over the course of their lives, yielding a crude notion of cohort replacement. Macro patterns in generational growth define the meandering path of the flow, while temporal booms and busts echo through the flow with the regularity of a pulse.