A few papers have recently come out on the importance of social influence and support on childbearing 1/3 in South Korea: "We argue that reproductive decisions are shaped by relational processes within neo-traditional familism, not solely individual planning"

From Childless Intentions to Motherhood: Familial Pro‐Natalism Among Korean Middle‐Class Women

While literature often frames fertility decisions as individual economic choices, the subtle influence of kinship ties is underexplored. This study examines how married South Korean women, who initia...

compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

New paper alert! Vital stats only capture individual births, not people’s reproductive career. For that, demographers use surveys that collect full fertility histories. But these fertility histories are less helpful if people don’t fully report all their births or report info inaccurately. 1/

Demography - the flagship journal of PAA@readdemography.bsky.social · 6d ago

In “Reliability of Repeated Measures of Retrospective Parity,” @karenguzzo.bsky.social et al show that 1 in 5 parents reported a different parity between survey waves, split equally btw “losing” & “finding” a birth. @uncpopcenter.bsky.social @cfdr-bgsu.bsky.social read.dukeupress.edu/demography/a...

Expanding H-1B visas boosted US worker incomes and productivity, especially in non-STEM jobs, with gains flowing downstream via supply chains, from Ran Abramitzky, Leah Platt Boustan, Ahmet Gulek, and Jens Hainmueller www.nber.org/papers/w35560

ND sociology is HIRING! We have three (yes, 3!!!) lines! (1) Open-Rank, Open Field careercenter.asanet.org/job/1311611/... (2) Assistant Professor, Quantitative Sociology careercenter.asanet.org/job/1311610/... (3) Assistant Professor, Sociology of Education careercenter.asanet.org/job/1311609/...

If you're attending #ASA2026 in NYC later this week/next week, please join us bright & early on Monday for a session on pronatalism.

I'm organizing a session on Reproductive Injustice for PAA this year. Send along all your depressing papers. I'll read them for science! ✊✊✊ higherlogicdownload.s3.amazonaws.com/POPULATIONAS...

It's here! The @popassocamerica.bsky.social Call for Papers for its 2027 annual meeting is officially live! Lots of great topics. Start thinking about your submissions!!! paa_acgi.informz.net/z/cjUucD9taT...

Get to work

ALT: Get to work

static.klipy.com

I'm so happy to announce version 2.0.0 of my #Rstats package WeightIt is out on CRAN! New features: censoring weights, multilevel propensity scores, improved weights for continuous treatments, bias-reduced ordinal and multinomial models, M-estimation in subgroups Check out the website below!

Weighting for Covariate Balance in Observational Studies

Generates balancing weights for causal effect estimation in observational studies with binary, multi-category, or continuous point or longitudinal treatments by easing and extending the functionality ...

ngreifer.github.io

New job market paper 🚨 Local newsrooms are cutting crime coverage—but not homicide, which nearly every journalist I interviewed considers too important to skip. So why did so many journalists recount open newsroom disagreements over homicide coverage? onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

New ESR paper: In traditional Italy, income positively predicts parenthood for men/women, especially among high-income couples. This is at odds with classic sex-specialisation theory, implying high economic prerequisites/stratification of parenthood under rising childlessness doi.org/10.1093/esr/...

New working paper With Torben Johansen and @ChristianVedel It's on a methodological issue that we think is crucial for the discipline of economic history: Whenever we use machine learning tools in our workflow, they can introduce structural bias. So, what should we do?

has my five year old … been taking advice from Mel Brooks? I’m so proud.

Tits McGee@scientits.bsky.social · 2mo ago

‘Say yes and never do it’ Mel Brooks knew how to deal with the studios

"If it bleeds, it leads"—many people assume crime news is just about chasing clicks. After interviewing 58 crime journalists across 40 newsrooms, I found something more complicated. My first dissertation paper is live at @sociologicalsci.bsky.social 🧵 sociologicalscience.com/articles-v13...

I did not know about this. This seems really bad.

Aaron Sojourner@aaronsojourner.org · 2mo ago

From former U.S. Census Chief Scientist John Abowd on LinkedIn, what Census data products are affected by Commerce's new policy? A devastating set of answers including all ACS Public Use Micro Samples www.linkedin.com/posts/john-a...

Important new work by Wu, @nickdemark.bsky.social, & Hill in @readdemography.bsky.social suggesting that, even for cohorts most impacted by the Great Recession, lifetime completed fertility is still likely to be at or near 2 births doi.org/10.1215/0070...

Curious about the recent claims that the iPhone led to huge declines in births? @drjenndowd.bsky.social breaks down the analyses and brings some much needed skepticism.

Did the iPhone Cause the Baby Bust?

I'm not so convinced. An interesting new paper highlights the power and pitfalls of simple stories

jenndowd.substack.com

Interesting paper by Wu, Mark and Hill on effect of Great Recession on US Fertility. Relative declines of 7–30% and absolute declines of 0.013–0.031 births per woman. Shouldn't have spent so much time texting your friends about the economy back then read.dukeupress.edu/demography/a...

“Effect of the Great Recession on U.S. Fertility”: Using a cohort discontinuity design, Wu, @nickdemark.bsky.social & Hill show “strong & credibly causal evidence” that the GR altered fertility behavior, esp. for the youngest cohorts (relative declines of 7-30%). read.dukeupress.edu/demography/a...

Summary of Key Changes in OMB’s Proposed Federal Financial Assistance Rule. Russell Vought is going destroy American Science. elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/summary-of...

Summary of Key Changes in OMB’s Proposed Federal Financial Assistance Rule

Russell Vought is going destroy American Science

elizabethginexi.substack.com

The US only seems to care about women and babies during pregnancy. And once mothers have a produced a baby, no one seems to care about them or for them.

Opinion | The Medical System Abandons Women When They Are Most Vulnerable

nytimes.com

I assigned random gender/ethnicity labels to scientific abstracts from the literature and then asked Claude to do a thematic analysis. Claude identified a clinical versus computational split for female/male authors and a DEI focus for Black/URM authors. All in completely random data.

I think this will be increasingly true with llms too.

jon ben-menachem@jbenmenachem.com · 3mo ago

One of the other reflections I have on the Big Data debate is how wrong the original prediction seems to have been -- that interview research would become outdated. In fact, as time goes on, original data collected by humans for research purposes seems like the most valuable data of all.

I have read this FT story by @jburnmurdoch.ft.com and I believe it is "some bullshit." A lot of effort and data work, and an extremely exaggerated causal story, bolstered by Melissa Kearney saying it is "plausible" and Lyman Stone doing whatever he does. www.ft.com/content/fba3... /1

Why birth rates are falling everywhere all at once

Homes and phones are part of the reason for the demographic shift changing our world

ft.com

My new article on the “Pig in the Python” argues that the demand for young workers will grow dramatically over the coming decades, likely leading to rising wages, stronger unions, and lower inequality. 1/28

Today is the final day in the stay of the mifepristone case. 🚨 Medication abortion is NOT going away. We know misoprostol is a safe and effective medication abortion option. ➡️ Our evidence of US-based use doi.org/10.1363/psrh... ➡️ NEJM Review of studies evidence.nejm.org/doi/full/10....

How Effective Is Misoprostol Alone for Medication Abortion?

With recent severe restrictions to abortion accessibility in the United States and a pending Supreme Court case challenging the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone, evidence-bas...

evidence.nejm.org

I have yet to dig into detail but it’s interesting to note that the same discipline, economics, has the highest reproducibility (does the code run?) and lowest replicability (does it work on different data?)

Nature@nature.com · 4mo ago

A massive seven-year project exploring 3,900 social-science papers has ended with a disturbing finding go.nature.com/4bZ9k0W

Fellow #demographers - coming to #PAA2026 ? 🤓 💫 Please save the date for the Feminist Demography Pre-Conference Workshop! Wednesday 5/6/2026 9-5pm CST in-person at PAA! Flash talks! A moderated panel discussion! And a social hour to connect with fellow feminist demography colleagues!

I am excited to be hiring two post-doctoral positions at UCLA--please share with your networks. www.aeaweb.org/joe/listing.....

Women’s college attendance delivers wage and job-quality gains that grow over the life cycle, alongside improvements in children’s early-life health, from Na'ama Shenhav and Danielle H. Sandler www.nber.org/papers/w34767