Publications by authors named "Francesco Billari"

This study assesses the initial effects of the 2016 Brexit referendum on the mobility of academic scholars to and from the United Kingdom (UK). We leverage bibliometric data from millions of Scopus publications to infer changes in the countries of residence of published researchers by the changes in their institutional affiliations over time. We focus on a selected sample of active and internationally mobile researchers whose movements are traceable for every year between 2013 and 2019 and measure the changes in their migration patterns.

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A growing body of research shows that demographic attitudes and behaviors across the life course are socially stratified. Building on this and focusing on the transition to parenthood, we hypothesize that (i) parental socioeconomic status is associated with multiple dimensions of the transition to parenthood, including fertility norms (perceived lower age limit at first birth), ideals (ideal age at first birth), and behaviors (age at first birth), and that (ii) this association varies across national contexts, as national contexts determine the opportunities and constraints that guide young adults' life course attitudes and behaviors. Drawing on the European Social Survey 2006 and 2018 data, we analyze early fertility norms and ideals and later fertility behaviors of a pseudo-panel of individuals born between 1976 and 1988.

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In 2020, COVID-19-related governmental restrictions forced individuals to radically change their habits, possibly impacting on their living arrangements. Whether COVID-19 affected young adults' propensity to leave the parental home is still unknown; Southern Europe is of particular interest, as youth experience the "latest-late" transition to adulthood, face uncertainty in the labor market, and receive low welfare support. Using EU-SILC longitudinal data from Greece, Spain, Italy, and Portugal, this study examines how home-leaving rates evolved in the short-term and explores the relationship between governmental restrictions, economic characteristics of households and young adults, and leaving home behaviors.

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Scientific ideas on the human population tend to be rooted in a "slow demography" paradigm, which emphasizes an inertial, predictable, self-contained view of population dynamics, mostly dependent on fertility and mortality. Yet, demography can also move fast. At the country level, it is crucial to empirically assess how fast demography moves by taking migratory movements into account, in addition to fertility and mortality.

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Family formation, a process that includes union formation, fertility, and their timing and order, has become increasingly diverse and complex in Europe. We examine how the relationship between socio-economic background and family formation has changed over time in France, Italy, Romania, and Sweden, using first wave Generations and Gender Survey data. Competing Trajectories Analysis, a procedure which combines event-history analysis with sequence analysis, allows us to examine family formation as a process, capturing differences in both the timing of the start of family formation and the pathways that young adults follow.

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The Internet has revolutionized our economies, societies, and everyday lives. Many social phenomena are no longer the same as they were in the pre-Internet era: they have been "." We define the of international migration, and we investigate it by exploring the links between the Internet and migration outcomes all along the migration path, from migration intentions to actual migration.

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Background: Understanding public perceptions of government responses to COVID-19 may foster improved public cooperation. Trust in government and population risk of exposure may influence public perception of the response. Other population-level characteristics, such as country socio-economic development, COVID-19 morbidity and mortality, and degree of democratic government, may influence perception.

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For billions of people across the globe, mobile phones enable relatively cheap and effective communication, as well as access to information and vital services on health, education, society, and the economy. Drawing on context-specific evidence on the effects of the digital revolution, this study provides empirical support for the idea that mobile phones are a vehicle for sustainable development at the global scale. It does so by assembling a wealth of publicly available macro- and individual-level data, exploring a wide range of demographic and social development outcomes, and leveraging a combination of methodological approaches.

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Background: During the transition to adulthood many young adults become obese for the first time in their lives, yet relatively little research has examined why people in this life phase become obese. This study examines what career and family life-course pathways during the transition to adulthood are related to developing obesity in young adulthood.

Methods: We use data from the NLSY97, a U.

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The spread of high-speed (broadband) Internet epitomizes the digital revolution. Using German panel data, we test whether the availability of broadband influences fertility choices in a low-fertility setting well known for the difficulty in combining work and family life. We exploit a strategy devised by Falck and colleagues to obtain causal estimates of the impact of broadband on fertility.

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Objectives: To document the association between economic development, income inequality, and health-related public infrastructure, and health outcomes among Chinese adults in midlife and older age.

Methods: We use a series of multi-level regression models with individual-level baseline data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Survey (CHARLS). Provincial-level data are obtained both from official statistics and from CHARLS itself.

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We investigate the effect of providing information about the benefits to children of attending formal child care when women intend to use formal child care so they can work. We postulate that the reaction to the information differs across women according to their characteristics, specifically their level of education. We present a randomized experiment in which 700 Italian women of reproductive age with no children are exposed to positive information about formal child care through a text message or a video, while others are not.

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We argue that the divergence in fertility trends in advanced societies is influenced by the interaction of long-standing differences in generalized trust with the increase in women's educational attainment. Our argument builds on the idea that trust enhances individuals' and couples' willingness to outsource childcare to outside their extended family. This becomes critically important as women's increased education enhances the demand for combining work and family life.

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Despite cohabitation becoming increasingly equivalent to marriage in some of the most 'advanced' Western European societies, the vast majority of people still marry. Why so? Existing theories, mostly based on various approaches tied to cognitive decision-making, do not provide a sufficient explanation of the persistence of marriage. In this article, we argue that feelings attached to marriage, i.

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Economic hardship accompanying large recessions can lead families to terminate unplanned pregnancies. To assess whether abortions have risen during the recession, we collected crude abortion data from 2000 to 2012 from Eurostat for countries that had legal abortions and complete data. Declining trends in abortion ratios between 2000 and 2009 have been reversing.

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Demographers study population change across time and place, and traditionally they place a strong emphasis on a long-range view of population change. This paper builds on current reflections on how to structure the study of population change and proposes a two-stage perspective. The first stage, discovery, focuses on the production of novel evidence at the population level.

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This article suggests a procedure to derive stochastic population forecasts adopting an expert-based approach. As in previous work by Billari et al. (2012), experts are required to provide evaluations, in the form of conditional and unconditional scenarios, on summary indicators of the demographic components determining the population evolution: that is, fertility, mortality, and migration.

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Generalized trust refers to trust in other members of society; it may be distinguished from particularized trust, which corresponds to trust in the family and close friends. An extensive empirical literature has established that generalized trust is an important aspect of civic culture. It has been linked to a variety of positive outcomes at the individual level, such as entrepreneurship, volunteering, self-rated health, and happiness.

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This paper provides a review of fertility research in advanced societies, societies in which birth control is the default option. The central aim is to provide a comprehensive review that summarizes how contemporary research has explained ongoing and expected fertility changes across time and space (i.e.

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Descriptive statistics indicate that civil marriages and marriages preceded by premarital cohabitation are more unstable, i.e., more frequently followed by divorce.

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Knowledge of social contact patterns still represents the most critical step for understanding the spread of directly transmitted infections. Data on social contact patterns are, however, expensive to obtain. A major issue is then whether the simulation of synthetic societies might be helpful to reliably reconstruct such data.

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During the twentieth century, the global population has gone through unprecedented increases in economic and social development that coincided with substantial declines in human fertility and population growth rates. The negative association of fertility with economic and social development has therefore become one of the most solidly established and generally accepted empirical regularities in the social sciences. As a result of this close connection between development and fertility decline, more than half of the global population now lives in regions with below-replacement fertility (less than 2.

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Social contact patterns are a critical explanatory factor of the spread of close-contact infectious agents. Both indirect (via observed epidemiologic data) and direct (via diaries that record at-risk events) approaches to the measurement of contacts by age have been proposed in the literature. In this paper, the authors discuss the possibilities offered by time-use surveys to measure contact patterns and to explain observed seroprevalence profiles.

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The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of the family of origin on whether migrant and Dutch young adults live in the parental home. Using a sample of 1,678 young adults aged between 15 and 30 years from 847 families with five different ethnic backgrounds, we identified patterns of co-residence and investigated how and to what extent the likelihood of co-residence was influenced by migrant background, family ties, and the socio-economic characteristics of the family. The results show that of the four migrant groups, only Moroccan young adults are more likely than those of Dutch origin to live with their parents.

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