Despite attention to the demographic consequences of armed conflict, quantitative research on how conflict, particularly conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV), affects union formation remains limited. This study examines how armed conflict and CRSV are associated with first union formation in Uganda, where 49
Research on correlations in social program use within families has emphasized either intergenerational (parent–child) or intragenerational (sibling) ties, but rarely both together. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (1975–2019; 59,865 person-wave observations nested in 9934 sibling dyads from 3044 parental families), we estimated three-level mixed-effects logistic models to examine how family history of SNAP use—distinguishing early-life exposure from adult history of parents and siblings (“ever” versus current participation)—is associated with adults’ SNAP participation. Descriptively, SNAP use and socioeconomic disadvantage vary sharply by enrollment status and race. In multivariable models, two patterns emerge. First, early-life exposure is associated with adult participation in pooled analyses and among White respondents, but it is not statistically significant for Black respondents once adult family history is included. Second, adulthood family history—parents’ and siblings’ ever participation—is consistently associated with adult enrollment, whereas current parental or sibling use shows little additional association after adjusting for covariates and fixed effects. Race-stratified estimates share this adulthood pattern for both White and Black respondents. Findings highlight the importance of family networks across the life course: accumulated program experience within kin—rather than simultaneous use—correlates with adult enrollment. We interpret these results through a strengths-based, equity-aware lens in which family members share information and logistical support that help navigate administrative burden.
Fertility remains persistently low across advanced economies despite progress in gender equality and the expansion of family policy. This study reexamines the gender-fertility relationship by jointly estimating the effects of women's political empowerment and family-related public spending on period and tempo-adjusted fertility. The analysis draws on annual data for 30 OECD countries from 2003 to 2021, measuring public-sphere gender equality with the Women's Political Empowerment Index and family-policy effort with public expenditure on family benefits as a percentage of GDP. Two-way fixed-effects models relate two-year-lagged predictors to the total fertility rate (TFR) and a tempo-adjusted TFR (adjTFR), net of macroeconomic, labor-market, housing, and normative controls. Under the identifying assumptions of the design, women's political empowerment shows no detectable causal effect on either fertility measure. By contrast, family-related public spending has a positive estimated causal effect on both TFR and adjTFR. The estimated effect is larger and more precise for TFR than for adjTFR. The significant adjTFR effect indicates that the effect is not confined to tempo-related variation in period fertility, while the larger TFR estimate is consistent with an additional timing-sensitive component, although this interpretation remains suggestive rather than established. Overall, family-policy effort is a more consistently detectable driver of fertility-particularly period fertility-than women's political empowerment. Alternative gender-equality indicators yield divergent estimates, indicating that conclusions about the gender equality-fertility relationship depend on how gender equality is operationalized.
Latin America has undergone a rapid fertility transition, with total fertility rates of 1.50 in Argentina, 1.61 in Brazil, 1.89 in Mexico, and 1.96 in Peru, levels comparable to, or lower than, those of European and Asian countries that have adopted explicit pronatalist policies. Yet no Latin American government has intervened to increase the birth rate. This article examined this paradox through a most-different systems comparative analysis of four countries during 2015–2025, drawing on policy documents, legislative records, political discourse, and official demographic data. The analysis identified four convergent mechanisms that block pronatalism across ideologically diverse regimes: the normative closure imposed by the Cairo-Montevideo reproductive rights paradigm; the institutional weakness of familist-informal welfare regimes, which lack the fiscal and administrative capacity to implement effective natalist incentives; the lasting delegitimization of demographic intervention produced by authoritarian legacies of reproductive coercion; and the structural saturation of political agendas by immediate crises that foreclose long-term demographic deliberation. We introduced the concept of “demographic silence” to distinguish the structurally produced absence of political deliberation on fertility from mere policy neglect, and proposed a continuum of non-emergence ranging from active institutional acceptance (Mexico) to constitutional subordination (Brazil), feminist reframing (Argentina), and full “demographic silence” (Peru). These findings qualify the expectation, present in part of the demographic literature, that sustained below-replacement fertility tends to generate a pronatalist response, and they offer a transferable analytical framework for understanding the non-emergence of pronatalism in Global South contexts.
Using unique longitudinal data on individuals who resided in a mid-sized Swedish city as children (ages 1–17) from 1947 to 1967, we examined the long-term effects of experiencing family and neighborhood poverty during childhood on adult income. Poverty during childhood was calculated for the family and, using geocoded addresses, for the individualized, resident-centered neighborhood. Adult income at ages 40–49 was identified in national registers from 1968 to 2015. We estimated Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression models to examine how both childhood family poverty and neighborhood poverty were associated with adult income. We found that neighborhood poverty in childhood was associated with lower adult income, even after accounting for family poverty in childhood. This association was substantial for men who experienced childhood poverty, especially between 1 and 6 years of age, where living in a poor neighborhood significantly reduced adult income. The weaker association between childhood neighborhood poverty and adult income for women may be, at least in part, explained by the rise in women’s educational attainment over this period. The effects of childhood family and neighborhood poverty were constant over time and across birth cohorts, even during the first expansion of the Swedish welfare state that should have mitigated such disadvantage.
