Christian Dudel

Reproductive-age populations show a growing male surplus around the globe as a consequence of declining mortality, narrowing sex differences in mortality, and sex-selective abortions in some countries. Population structures are important determinants of marriage markets and childbearing. In this study, we estimate the past, current, and future difference between the male and the female total fertility rates around the world using an established indirect demographic approach drawing on data from the UN World Population Prospects. Our results indicate a crossover from historically higher male fertility to increasingly higher female fertility, which occurs globally in 2024. This shift is not toward parity, but rather reflects a growing disparity driven by the increasing male surplus at reproductive ages, which exerts downward pressure on male fertility rates relative to those of women. The difference is expected to grow to up to 20% in countries like China and India, where sex-selective abortion has reinforced sex imbalances in population structures. Overall, we highlight the growing sex inequalities in reproduction and call for more research on sex differences in fertility.

Automation transforms work at a rapid pace, with gradually increasing shares of the workforce at risk of being replaced by machines. However, little is known about how this risk is affecting workers. In this study, we examine the relationship between exposure to high automation risk at work and both subjective (self‐reported health, anxiety, and health satisfaction) and objective (healthcare use and sickness absence) health outcomes of workers in Germany. We base our analysis on survey data from the German Socio‐Economic Panel (SOEP) and administrative data from the Occupational Panel for Germany (2013–2022). Employing panel regression, we demonstrate that for workers, exposure to high automation risk at the occupational level is associated with lower self‐reported health and health satisfaction, as well as increased sickness absence. No significant effects are observed for anxiety and healthcare use. Our heterogeneity analysis reveals only minor variations in the effects across several demographic and occupational characteristics. We also conduct multiple robustness checks (i.e., alternative model specifications and risk measures with different thresholds), with the results remaining largely consistent with our main findings.

While full retirement age in the United States is increasing, longevity improvements have stagnated, Americans with low educational attainment have not experienced delayed health impairments, and there remain substantial racial disparities in morbidity and mortality. Using the Health and Retirement Study, we ran discrete-time multistate models to examine how these trends together shape educational and racial/ethnic differences in expected time spent in healthy work, unhealthy work, healthy retirement, and unhealthy retirement after age 50 in 1994–2006 and 2008–2020. We found marked educational, and to a lesser degree racial/ethnic, disparities in accessing healthy retirement years—which we defined as years without work and without functional limitations. Compared to 1994–2006, 2008–2020 brought increases in healthy retirement only for college-educated White and Black women (+0.49 and +0.21 years, respectively). Healthy work increased for college-educated White and Hispanic men (+1.35 and +0.49 years, respectively) and for White and Hispanic women with a range of education levels. Disadvantaged groups (e.g., men with only high school degrees, Black and Hispanic women without high school degrees) experienced increased years in unhealthy retirement. Unhealthy work rose for Hispanic men and women and Black men with medium and high education. Taken together, it appears that trends in retirement timing, functioning, and mortality have reduced overall healthy retirement years and expanded educational and racial/ethnic disparities in accessing healthy retirement.

Men's childlessness is increasing in many high-income countries. In Finland, 29 per cent of all men aged 45 were childless in 2022. The cause of these high levels of childlessness is unclear. In this paper, we use rich Finnish population register data to examine whether sex imbalances in regional partner markets are a potential driver of men's childlessness. Partner markets are imbalanced in a given region if there is a surplus of men relative to women or vice versa. The data generally show an increasingly imbalanced partner market situation for men over time but with considerable regional heterogeneity. Individual-level regression results for men born in 1968-75 (N = 194,080) indicate an increased probability of childlessness at age 45 after extended exposure to imbalanced partner markets over the life course. This association is particularly strong for low-income men. These findings are robust across indicators and specifications. Overall, regional context seems to play a crucial role in the risk of childlessness.

Economic and social development are closely linked with fertility. Several studies have shown that the relationship follows an inverse J-shape: the association is negative at low and intermediate levels of development and reverses to become positive at high development levels. However, more recent research building on subnational and U.S. data found only mixed evidence for the inverse J-shape. In this article, we draw on subnational data on development and fertility in the U.S. states between 1969 and 2018 to examine the relationship between development and fertility. Using a longitudinal approach and addressing several criticisms of the fertility reversal hypothesis, our results support the inverse J-shaped pattern under most model specifications. However, this pattern might have vanished since the 2007–2008 financial crisis. Our findings provide insights into the mechanisms that link development and fertility, showing that gender equality and economic uncertainty mediate the relationship between development and fertility.

Age differences within couples are of considerable importance for the power relations between partners. These age differences become particularly relevant when couples transition to having a(nother) child, as such an event often results in a renegotiation of the gendered division of labor. Surprisingly, the literature on female empowerment and fertility postponement has so far paid little attention to parental age differences. This paper makes use of a new data set to present a demographic analysis of trends in parental age differences at childbirth in 15 high‐income countries, covering a period in which all of these countries experienced changes in gender relations and fertility postponement. The general trends in rising mean ages at childbirth have evolved quite similarly among men and women. However, we demonstrate that these similarities hide previously unexplored and highly gendered disparities in parental age differences. Older mothers report much smaller mean parental age differences than younger mothers, and this age pattern among mothers has further polarized over time. By contrast, older fathers report larger parental age differences than younger fathers, while the disparities by age among fathers have not changed much over time. We discuss the relevance of our findings at both the individual and the societal level.

The extension of late working life has been proposed as a potential remedy for the challenges of aging societies. For Germany, surprisingly little is known about trends and social inequalities in the length of late working life. We use data from the German Microcensus to estimate working life expectancy from age 55 onward for the 1941‒1955 birth cohorts. We adjust our calculations of working life expectancy for working hours and present results for western and eastern Germany by gender, education, and occupation. While working life expectancy has increased across cohorts, we find strong regional and socioeconomic disparities. Decomposition analyses show that among males, socioeconomic differences are predominantly driven by variation in employment rates; among women, variation in both employment rates and working hours are highly relevant. Older eastern German women have longer working lives than older western German women, which is likely attributable to the German Democratic Republic legacy of high female employment.