Immigrant mothers’ preferences for children’s sexes: A register-based study of fertility behaviour in Norway

Parental sex preferences have been documented in many native populations, but much less evidence is available on immigrants’ preferences for the sexes of their children. Using high-quality longitudinal register data from Norway, a country with a recent immigration history, we estimate hazards regression models of third birth risks by the sex composition of the first two children. A central question in the extant literature is whether the sex preferences of immigrant mothers match those observed in their country of origin, or if cultural adaption to local conditions is more important. Our analyses indicate that the sex preferences of immigrants generally match those previously documented for their native population, especially in the case of son preferences. The pattern of sex preferences is unmodified by the mother’s exposure to the host society. In sum, our evidence generally supports theories emphasizing cultural persistence in preferences, rather than theories of adaption or immigrant selectivity.     

Dissolution risks in first and higher order marital and cohabiting unions

More and more people enter multiple unions during their lives, and then they may choose to either cohabit or marry. We examine the implications of this diversity in partnership trajectories by assessing dissolution risks in first and higher order marital and cohabiting unions. We use recent Norwegian survey data that contain complete retrospective union histories. We find that, when selectivity is accounted for, higher-order unions are not less stable than first unions. When dissolution risks for all possible partnership trajectories are compared, we find that former cohabitants who cohabit in a second union are as likely to break up as they were in their first cohabiting union. As soon as they enter marriage in their second unions, however, they do slightly better than first married persons. The previously married experience higher dissolution risks in their second union compared to their first, regardless of their current union type.     

Does Community Context Have an Important Impact on Divorce Risk? A Fixed-Effects Study of Twenty Norwegian First-Marriage Cohorts

The decision to divorce may be affected by the characteristics of the local community. Community characteristics may be barriers to divorce, or they may increase the attractiveness of divorcing (e.g., access to a good remarriage market), but our knowledge of such influences is sparse. This study examines two such community-level factors: socio-economic conditions and the local marriage market. In this study, discrete-time hazard models with community-level fixed effects are estimated using register-based data on Norwegian first marriages during the period from 1980 to 1999, with longitudinal information on both the community and couple levels (N?=?283,493). The results show that there are important community-level influences on couples?? divorce risk, but these change dramatically when fixed effects are introduced.     

Do Siblings’ Fertility Decisions Influence Each Other?

Individuals’ fertility decisions are shaped not only by their own characteristics and life course paths but also by social interaction with others. However, in practice, it is difficult to disentangle the role of social interaction from other factors, such as individual and family background variables. We measure social interaction through the cross-sibling influences on fertility. Continuous-time hazard models are estimated separately for women’s first and second births. In addition to individual socioeconomic variables, demographic variables, and an unobserved factor specific to each sibling pair, siblings’ birth events and their timing enter as time-varying covariates. We use data from longitudinal population-wide Norwegian administrative registers. The data cover more than 110,000 sibling pairs and include the siblings’ fertility, education, income, and marital histories. Our results indicate that cross-sibling influences are relatively strong for the respondents’ first births but weak for the second parity transition.     

Family Life History and Late Mid‐Life Mortality in Norway

Using data on all Norwegians born 1935–68, we analyze the associations between mortality and a combined indicator of fertility and marital or partnership status and history. The focus is on ages 40–73 and the years 1980–2008 (30 million person‐years of observations and 117,000 deaths). Among men in first marriages, the childless have 36 percent higher mortality than those with two or more children. The corresponding figure for women is 61 percent. The never‐married have higher mortality and are differentiated even more by parenthood status. Thus, childless never‐married men and women have mortality three times as high as those who are married and have two or more children. The apparent advantage associated with having at least two children is smallest among men who divorced before their oldest child's tenth birthday. Having step‐children has no association with mortality for those without natural children but is associated with higher mortality among the parous.     

Accounting for Genocide: How Many Were Killed in Srebrenica?

The takeover of the UN safearea of Srebrenica by Bosnian Serb forces inJuly 1995 was followed by the killing of alarge number of male Bosnian Muslim civilians,in what has been characterized as the worstmassacre in Europe since World War II. Thisarticle is based on a report submitted asevidence to the UN International CriminalTribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) inthe case against General Radislav Krsti,who became the first person to be convicted ofgenocide at this Tribunal. This case also formspart of the genocide charges against SlobodanMiloevi, Radovan Karadi and RatkoMladi. To our knowledge, this report isunique among genocide studies in its approach,using individual-level data to identify everyvictim in order to arrive at a highly reliableminimum estimate of the number of peoplekilled. This was possible because of efforts byhumanitarian organizations to register peoplewho disappeared during the war as well as theavailability of both pre- and post-conflictdata on individuals. We conclude that at least7,475 persons were killed after the fall ofSrebrenica. We also present estimates of theprobability of being a victim: more than 33%for Muslim men who were enumerated inSrebrenica in 1991.