Social contacts offer opportunities for provision of emotional and instrumental support that enhance well-being throughout the life course, and the importance of these contacts is especially evident at advanced ages. In this paper, we take a cross-country comparative perspective to examine the association between the number of children and the frequency of social contacts among older people. Using data from the European Quality of Life Survey, we employ multilevel models with cross-level interactions between the number of children and macro-level indicators of filial norms and social policies supporting older people. Our results suggest that older adults with children are more likely than older adults without children to have frequent social interactions, but that the number of children does not affect social contact frequency. The magnitude of the association between having children and social contact frequency varies across European societies. The social contact frequency gap between older adults with children and older adults without children is larger in more familialistic countries with strong filial norms. Our results do not confirm that having children affects social contact frequency less in countries where the state provides more support for older people.

Comparative studies of health inequalities have largely neglected age and ageing aspects, while ageing research has often paid little attention to questions of social inequalities. This article investigates cross-country differences in gradients in self-rated health and limiting long-standing illness (LLSI) in middle-aged and in older people (aged 50–64 and 65–80 years) linked to social class, and degrees to which the social health gradients are associated with minimum pension levels and expenditure on elderly care. For these purposes, data from the European Social Survey (2002–2010) are analysed using multilevel regression techniques. We find significant cross-level interaction effects between class and welfare policies: higher expenditure on elderly care and particularly more generous minimum pensions are associated with smaller health inequalities in the older age group (65–80 years). It is concluded that welfare policies moderate the association between social class and health, highlighting the importance of welfare state efforts for older persons, who are strongly reliant on the welfare state and welfare state arrangements such as pensions and care policies.

Demographic research has paid much attention to the impact of childhood conditions on adult mortality. We focus on one of the key aspects of early life conditions, sibling group size, and examine the causal effect of growing up in a large family on mortality. While previous studies have focused on low- or middle-income countries, we examine whether growing up in a large family is a disadvantage in Sweden, a context where most parents have adequate resources, which are complemented by a generous welfare state. We used Swedish register data and frailty models, examining all-cause and cause-specific mortality between the ages of 40 and 74 for the 1938–72 cohorts, and also a quasi-experimental approach that exploited multiple births as a source of exogenous variation in the number of siblings. Overall our results do not indicate that growing up in a large family has a detrimental effect on longevity in Sweden.

Background: In many societies, growing up in a large family is associated with receiving less parental time, attention, and financial support. As a result, children with a large number of siblings may have worse physical and mental health outcomes than children with fewer siblings.

Objective: Our objective is to examine the long-term causal effects of sibship size on physical and mental health in modern Sweden.

Methods: We employ longitudinal data covering the entire Swedish population from the Multigenerational Register and the Medical Birth Register. This data includes information on family size and on potential confounders such as parental background. We use the Prescribed Drug Register to identify the medicines that have been prescribed and dispensed. We use instrumental variable models with multiple births as instruments to examine the causal effects of family size on the health outcomes of children, as measured by receiving medicines at age 45.

Results: Our results indicate that in Sweden, growing up in a large family does not have a detrimental effect on physical and mental health in midlife.

Contribution: We provide a systematic overview of the health-related implications of growing up in a large family. We adopt a research design that gives us the opportunity to make causal inferences about the long-term effects of family size. Moreover, our paper provides evidence on the links between family size and health outcomes in the context of a developed country that implements policies oriented towards reducing social inequalities in health and other living conditions.

This paper contributes to the discussion on the effects of the number of children on female employment in Europe. Most previous research has either (1) compared these effects across countries, assuming an exogeneity of family size; or (2) used methods that dealt with endogeneity of family size, but that focused on single countries. We combine these two approaches by taking a cross-country comparative perspective and applying quasi-experimental methods. We use instrumental variable models, with multiple births as instruments, and the harmonized data from the European Survey on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC). We examine the cross-country variation in the effects of family size on maternal employment across groups of European countries with different welfare state regimes. This step gives us an opportunity to investigate whether the revealed cross-country differences in the magnitude of the effect of the family size on maternal employment can be attributed to the diversity of European institutional arrangements, as well as the cultural and the structural conditions for combining work and family duties.

This contribution focuses on the consequences of early job insecurity and labour market exclusion (i.e. unemployment or economic inactivity) for youths' autonomy in Europe, referring to leaving the parental home and forming one's own family.

Kierunki biznesowe zapewniają szanse zawodowe porównywalne do uczelni technicznych; Osoby młode poszukujące pracy znajdują zatrudnienie częściej niż osoby w wieku dojrzałym; W przypadku zwolnień, w pierwszej kolejności redukowane są stanowiska pracy młodych pracowników; • Młode osoby częściej znajdują zatrudnienie w małych firmach oraz w sektorze usług. Taka struktura zatrudnienia wpływa na niską stabilność zatrudnienia w tej grupie społecznej; Sektor publiczny znacznie silniej chroni przed utratą pracy osoby w wieku dojrzałym niż młodych pracowników

The aim of this paper is to decompose the increase in the share of out-of-wedlock births in Poland into two components: one attributed to the changing structure of births based on marital status at conception, and one related to the declining propensity for shotgun weddings. Analysis of data from the Birth Register 1985-2009 shows that a decline in the propensity to marry among single pregnant women played an important role in the diffusion of non-marital childbearing, especially in the last decade. In urban areas, the impact of the declining propensity for shotgun weddings was greater than in rural areas. This is consistent with the notion that rural areas are a more traditional context for family formation. It seems that in villages, social pressure still inhibits the diversification of family forms more strongly than in cities.