This paper focuses on the residential resettlement decisions of a sample of immigrants from Iran and Turkey living in Sweden between 1968 and 2001. Using the Swedish Longitudinal Immigrant database, we are able to link unique pre-and post-migration data to understand whether region of origin is a better predictor of internal migration decisions than is country of origin, the more often used measure in existing research. More specifically, we test whether living in municipalities with a high number of individuals from the same country of origin is a similar phenomenon as a high number of individuals from the same region of origin. This is relevant, as large immigrant groups come from ethnically, religiously, and linguistically heterogeneous countries of origin where regional characteristics differ according to aforementioned aspects from that of the mainstream population. We indeed find that individuals are less likely to relocate from municipalities in which there is a large presence of other immigrants from the same region of origin. Instead, individuals residing in areas with a large number of individuals from their country of origin are observed with an elevated probability of resettlement.

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This study analyzes the intergenerational effects of late childbearing on offspring's adult longevity in a population in Utah (United States) that does not display evidence of parity-specific birth control-a so-called natural fertility population. Studies have found that for women who experience late menopause and prolonged reproduction, aging is postponed and longevity is increased. This is believed to indicate female "robustness" and the impact of biological or genetic factors. If indeed there is a genetic component involved, one would expect to also find evidence for the intergenerational transmission of longevity benefits. Our study investigates the relationship between prolonged natural fertility of mothers and their offspring's survival rates in adulthood. Gompertz regression models (N = 7,716) revealed that the offspring of mothers who were naturally fertile until a relatively advanced age lived significantly longer. This observed positive effect of late reproduction was not independent of but conditional upon survival of the mother to the end of her fecundity (defined as age 50). Offspring's relative risks at death beyond age 50 were 6-12 percent lower than those of their counterparts born to mothers who had an average age at last birth. Our results, which account for various early, adult, and later-life conditions, as well as shared frailty, suggest that there is a positive relationship between mother's age at last birth and offspring longevity, and strengthen the notion that age at menopause is a good predictor of this relationship.

This paper presents datasets that enable historical longitudinal studies of micro-level geographic factors in a rural setting. These types of datasets are new, as historical demography studies have generally failed to properly include the micro-level geographic factors. Our datasets describe the geography over five Swedish rural parishes, and by linking them to a longitudinal demographic database, we obtain a geocoded population (at the property unit level) for this area for the period 1813–1914. The population is a subset of the Scanian Economic Demographic Database (SEDD). The geographic information includes the following feature types: property units, wetlands, buildings, roads and railroads. The property units and wetlands are stored in object-lifeline time representations (information about creation, changes and ends of objects are recorded in time), whereas the other feature types are stored as snapshots in time. Thus, the datasets present one of the first opportunities to study historical spatio-temporal patterns at the micro-level.

BACKGROUNDChild mortality differed greatly within rural regions in Europe before and during the mortality transition. Little is known about the role of nutrition in such geographic differences, and about the factors affecting the nutritional status and hence the disease outcomes.