PopDigests

When parents are faced with unemployment just before pregnancy, how does this affect their child’s future? Many young parents are concerned about the health of their infant at birth. Health at birth has indeed been shown to affect later life outcomes, such as school grades, employment opportunities, and earnings. However, do parents have to worry about detrimental health effects from unemployment just before a pregnancy?

Single mothers face the task of providing for themselves and their children while also being the primary caregiver. Combining these tasks can be difficult. Even so, it was long believed that single mothers in Europe have the advantage of the welfare state: public childcare, housing regulations, and cash transfers would make their lives a little easier than those in other parts of the world. New research puts this belief into question.

When a couple decides to move in together, they have an important decision to make: who moves in with whom, or where will the new destination for both of them be? Particularly for long-distance couples, this decision has large consequences. That is, one or both partners will need to not only move house but move a long distance, which for many means moving away from family, friends, work and more. Those who move a long distance (i.e. migrate) to live with their partner are therefore likely to take a hit in their career and social network.

Miguel González-Leonardo, Michaela Potančoková, Dilek Yildiz and Francisco Rowe published a first study analysing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on immigration flows in a global sample of countries. They found important cross-national variations, from large drops in Australia, Spain or Sweden to minor changes in Finland, Switzerland, Austria, Ireland or Denmark. Travel restrictions, mobility restrictions and stay-at-home requirements show an association with changes in immigration, while work and school closures and unemployment rise show no relationship.

Eleonora Mussino and Stefano Cantalini look at the number of children migrants from two low-fertility contexts (Poland and Romania) have in two destinations (Italy and the United Kingdom), and compare them to co-nationals that never left the country of origin and to non-migrants at the destination country.

In this study, Giammarco Alderotti, Eleonora Mussino and Chiara Ludovica Comolli explored childbearing behaviour during the Great Recession (2010-2015) in Italy and Sweden across two dimensions of vulnerability: migration background and labour market uncertainty.

In this study, Amy Heshmati, Helena Honkaniemi and Sol P. Juárez (Stockholm University) evaluate the international scientific literature on the association between parental leave and parents’ mental health for both mothers and fathers.

In their latest study, Chiara Dello Iacono, Miguel Requena, and Mikolaj Stanek investigated the relationship between mothers’ partnership status and household structure and children’s low birth weights born in Spain.

In their latest study, Martin Klesment and Jan Van Bavel investigated how women’s relative education and earnings determine who makes important decisions for the family, particularly decisions to spend significant sums of money, to borrow money or spend savings.

Pavel Grigoriev and Sebastian Klüsener (German Federal Institute for Population Research) and Alyson van Raalte (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research) examine the effect of smoking on German regional differences in mortality.