F decades medieval historians have placed population at the centre of their concerns, but it is only in recent years that their studies have begun to constitute a respectable branch of historical demography. From the scrutiny of oblique records which provide indications of such matters as settlement, the size of landholdings, land values, prices and wages, attention has increasingly turned towa...

The zones exhibiting a major discontinuity, an abrupt change of the values taken by spatialized variable(s) generally delineate patterns and probably correspond to the zones of sharp changes for the causal variable(s) underlying the observed surface relief, or to barriers in dynamic processes. An example of this can be two contiguous areas of mortality generated by ecological and/or socio-econo...

The Nature of Demography by Hervé Le Bras, translated by Godfrey Rogers from the original French publication in 2005 (La démographie, Paris: Odille Jacob), is about change, as demonstrated by the title of the introduction: ‘the dynamics of change in demography’ (p. 1). On the one hand, measuring, modelling and understanding demographic changes at the individual and population level are regarded...

The increasing poverty rate for elderly women is a growing concern in Japan and is generally due to their lifestyle changes and the public pension system based on the pre-1980s (old) lifestyle. At that time, women were expected to get married and become homemakers. Therefore, the public pension system is generous for married women and widows but not for never-married and divorced women. Using a...

Over the last 40 years or so English parish registers have been extensively analysed to create a range of demographic measures relating to mortality, fertility and nuptiality. This process has enabled the major population changes to be revealed from 1538, the date when parish registers were first ordered to be kept, until 1837, when a national system of civil registration was introduced.1 In ad...

To begin with, we sketch a general multilevel model of regional social contexts and individual family formation behavior, where particular attention is paid to the determinants of the actor’s situation. Then a set of bridge hypotheses is proposed, on which the empirical investigation of the relationship between properties of the spatial context and women’s entry into motherhood and first marria...

BACKGROUND We extend the „Wedding Ring‟ agent-based model of marriage formation to include some empirical information on the natural population change for the United Kingdom together with behavioural explanations that drive the observed nuptiality trends. OBJECTIVE We propose a method to explore statistical properties of agent-based demographic models. By coupling rule-based explanations drivin...

To begin with, we sketch a general multilevel model of regional social contexts and individual family formation behavior, where particular attention is paid to the determinants of the actor’s situation. Then a set of bridge hypotheses is proposed, on which the empirical investigation of the relationship between properties of the spatial context and women’s entry into motherhood and first marria...