Fertility plans in the early times of the COVID-19 pandemic: The role of occupational and financial uncertainty in Italy.

This study investigates the association between objective and subjective indicators of economic uncertainty, generated by the COVID-19 health and economic crisis, and young Italians' fertility plans during the 2020. We use unique repeated cross-sectional data, collected at different time points during the pandemic (March and October/November 2020) together with pre-COVID data (2016). The data offer a standard fertility intention question pre- and during-COVID, and also a direct question on whether pre-COVID fertility plans have been confirmed, postponed or abandoned. In March 2020, individuals with more vulnerable occupations show a lower probability of intending to have a(nother) child in the short-term and a higher probability of abandoning their pre-COVID fertility plan; in October 2020 changes in fertility plans do not vary by employment condition. Instead, both in March and October, those who suffered from a negative income shock and those with negative expectations on their future income and occupation are more likely to abandon their pre-pandemic fertility plan compared to their better off counterparts. Overall, economic uncertainty seems to have similarly affected men and women's fertility intentions. Our findings point to the fact that the unequal economic consequences of the pandemic also produced and will produce heterogeneous effects on fertility intentions.

On the changes of the intention to leave the parental home during the COVID-19 pandemic: a comparison among five European countries.

With the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in Europe during the first months of 2020, most of the governments imposed restrictive measures to people mobility and physical distance (the lockdown), which severely impacted on the economic activities and performance of many countries. Thus, the health emergency turned rapidly into in an economic crisis. The COVID-19 crisis in Europe increased the uncertainty about the economic recovery and the end of health emergency. This situation is supposed to have conditioned individuals' life course path with the effect of inducing people to postpone or to abandon many life plans. This paper aims to explore and describe whether the rise of health emergency due to the COVID-19 has delayed or vanished young people's intention to leave the parental home, in order to establish their own household, during 2020 in five European countries: Italy, Germany, France, Spain and the UK. Using data from an international survey from the "Youth Project", carried out by the Toniolo Institute of Advanced Studies, this paper implements generalized logistic models for ordinal dependent variables to investigate the factors associated with a possible revision of the choice of leaving the parental home for a representative sample of 6000 respondents aged 18 to 34, interviewed between March and April 2020. In particular, we compare the effect of the occupational condition and the perceived income and employment vulnerability on the chance of confirmation, postponement or abandonment of the pre-pandemic plan across the five selected European countries. Results show that Italy, Spain and the UK are the countries with the highest probability of a downward revision of the intentions of leaving the nest. Especially in these countries, having negative expectations about changes in the individual's and family's future income is associated with the choice of abandoning the purpose of leaving the parental home. However, the vulnerability of the category of temporary workers particularly arises in Southern European countries: young people with precarious jobs seem to be the most prone to negatively revise their intentions of leaving, even compared with those not working.

The Measure of Population Aging in Different Welfare Regimes: A Bayesian Dynamic Modeling Approach.

Given a population at a specific time point, it is often of interest to identify the entry age into typical stages of life, such as being young, becoming adult and elderly. These age cutoffs are important because they influence the public opinion and have an impact on policy decisions. An issue of great social relevance is defining the threshold beyond which a person becomes elderly. Fixed cutoffs are debatable because of their conventional nature which disregards issues such as changing life expectancy and the evolving structure of the age distribution. The above shortcomings can be overcome if age cutoffs are defined endogenously, i.e., relative to the whole age distribution of each country at a specific time point. We pursue this line of research by presenting an analysis whose main features are: (1) establishing a relationship between a country's welfare regime and its age distribution and aging process, together with the identification of four clusters of countries corresponding to distinctive welfare models and (2) a Bayesian hierarchical dynamic model which accounts for the uncertainty in the time series of measurements of the endogenous cutoffs for the countries in the sample, as well as for their clustering structure. Our analysis leads to model-based estimates of country-specific endogenous age cutoffs and corresponding aging indicators. Additionally, we provide cluster-specific estimates, a novel contribution engendered by the use of hierarchical modeling, which widens the scope of our analysis beyond the countries which are present in the sample.

Young Italian NEETs (Not in Employment, Education, or Training) and the Influence of Their Family Background.

This work investigates the relationship between family variables (parents' educational level, relationship quality, intrusiveness, support, and autonomy) and young Italians' status as NEETs (Not in Employment, Education, or Training). We used data from a representative sample of 9,087 young Italians. Each participant filled out an anonymous online questionnaire that contained several scales to measure the variables mentioned above. The results reveal that parents' educational level and support have a protective effect on the risk of becoming a NEET for both genders. Autonomy has a specific negative impact for males while intrusiveness has a positive impact mainly for females.

Where, in which way and to what extent can Italian fertility grow in the next 15 years?

OBJECTIVE: The study aims at analysing the recent trends in fertility in Italy and at discussing its possible future trends. METHODS: We analyse the evolution of demographic indicators, such as the total fertility rate and the maternal age in Italy, in the last 30 years and we look for the most relevant determinants of birth postponement. We also discuss the most recent fertility forecasts for Italy and their implications. RESULTS: In Italy, the total fertility rate has declined sharply in the last 30 years, reaching a level among the lowest in the world. However, in the last decade a reversal in this trend has been recorded. We here show that, net of the effect of immigration, this reversal is mainly due to a recovery of postponed births after age 30. Nevertheless, this recovery is not sufficient to raise the total fertility rates up to the replacement level. The reasons for this insufficient recovery are related both to the marked delay in transition to adulthood and to the difficult reconciliation of work and maternity for Italian women, both hampering the fertility rates. CONCLUSIONS: The fertility decline in Italy has finally stopped in the last years even if the maternal age is continuously increasing. However, without ad hoc family policies the fertility recovery will be weak and limited to those areas of the country with a better welfare system and economically more developed.

Age and fertility: can women wait until their early thirties to try for a first birth?

Postponing the start of childbearing raises the question of fertility postponed versus fertility foregone. One of the limitations of previous studies of 'How late can you wait?' is that any observed decline in the probability of conception with age could be due to a decline in fecundability with age or due to a decline in coital frequency with age or due to both factors. Using data from a multinational longitudinal study conducted to determine the daily probability of conception among healthy subjects, a discrete-time event history model with long-term survivors (sterile population) is used to study the relationship between age and fecundability for childless women, while controlling for the pattern of intercourse within a menstrual cycle. The findings suggest that women can wait until their early thirties to try for a first birth, providing that they are not already sterile, as the magnitude of the decline in fecundability is very modest and of little practical importance.

A correlated frailty model with long-term survivors for estimating the heritability of breast cancer.

The aim of this study is to investigate the role of genetics and environment in susceptibility to breast cancer (frailty). An interdisciplinary approach was adopted, combining a correlated frailty-mixture model with genetic equations, allowing for decomposition of the frailty variance into genetic and environmental components. In addition, the possibility that a fraction of the population under study is 'immune' to the disease is evaluated, and changes in heritability estimates introducing a fraction of non-susceptible individuals are determined. The methodology is applied to breast cancer data from the Swedish Twin Registry, including information about all female monozygotic and dizygotic twin pairs born in Sweden between 1886 and 1967. The inferential problem is solved in a Bayesian framework and the numerical work is carried out using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods.

A model with long-term survivors for the analysis of current-status nuptiality data.

The model proposed in this paper combines a logistic regression model and a Weibull regression model for the analysis of current-status data. This joint model allows a simultaneous estimation of two sets of effects on the covariates: one on the probability that the event occurs (also known as quantum) and the other on the timing of the event. Thus, the model can be seen either as an extension of a survival-analysis model for use with current-status data where a survival fraction is added in order explicitly to take into account the possibility that the event may never occur, or as an extension of survival analysis with long-term survivors to the analysis of current-status data. As an illustrative application we apply our model to a study of nuptiality in seventeenth-century Italy.

The effect of losing the twin and losing the partner on mortality.

Several studies have explored the impact of marital bereavement on mortality, while increasing emphasis has recently been placed on genetic factors influencing longevity - in this paper, we study the impact of losing the spouse and losing the co-twin, for twins aged 50 to 70. We use data from the Danish Twin Registry and the Population Register of Denmark for the period 1968 through 1999. Firstly, we use survival analysis to study mortality after the death of the spouse or the co-twin. We find that the risk of dying is highest in the first year after the death of the spouse, as well as in the second year after the death of the co-twin. We then use event history analysis techniques to show that there is a strong impact of the event 'losing the co-twin' even after controlling for age, sex and zygosity and that this effect is significantly higher in the second year of bereavement. The effect is similar for men and women, and it is higher for monozygotic twins. The latter confirms the influence of genetic factors on survival, while the mortality trajectory with a peak in the second year after the death of the co-twin is consistent with the existence of a twin bereavement effect.