Related papers: Coupling between death spikes and birth troughs. P…

In part 1 we identified a new coupling between death spikes and birth dips that occurs following catastrophic events such as influenza pandemics and earthquakes. Here we seek to characterize some of the key features. We introduce a transfer…

Here the term "high frequency" refers to daily, weekly or monthly birth data. The fluctuations of daily birth numbers show a succession of spikes and dips which, at least at first sight, looks almost as random as white noise. However in…

We examine what happens in a population when it experiences an abrupt change in surrounding conditions. Several cases of such "abrupt transitions" for both physical and living social systems are analyzed from which it can be seen that all…

After birth setting up an effective immune system is a major challenge for all living organisms. In this paper we show that this process can be explored by using the age-specific infant death rate as a kind of sensor. This is made possible…

Investigating the ``physics'' of food crises consists in identifying features which are common to all large-scale food crises. One element which stands out is the fact that during a food crisis there is not only a surge in deaths but also a…

This study uses data from the 1918-1920 influenza pandemic in Japan along with newly digitized and complete census records on births and infant deaths to analyze mortality selection in utero. I find that fetal exposure to the influenza…

We show that a large scale mass mortality results in increased numbers of suicides. As a case in point, we consider the influenza epidemic of October 1918 in the United States. In this month, suicides peaked at a level of over 4s (where s…

This paper is not (or at least not only) about human infant mortality. In line with reliability theory, "infant" will refer here to the time interval following birth during which the mortality (or failure) rate decreases. This definition…

This paper investigates the causal relationship between income shocks during the first years of life and adulthood mortality due to specific causes of death. Using all death records in the United States during 1968-2004 for individuals who…

Understanding the statistical properties of a collection of individuals subject to random displacements and birth-and-death events is key to several applications in physics and life sciences, encompassing the diagnostic of nuclear reactors…

A mixture of two or more count distributions has become deeply embedded in the analysis of excess counts, often relative to the stationary (equilibrium) distributions of birth-death processes such as the geometric, Poisson, Poisson-Lindley…

Ever since the studies of Louis-Adolphe Bertillon in the late 19th century it has been known that marital status and number of children markedly affect death and suicide rates. This led in 1898 Emile Durkheim to conjecture a connection…

In this paper we study the iterated birth process of which we examine the first-passage time distributions and the hitting probabilities. Furthermore, linear birth processes, linear and sublinear death processes at Poisson times are…

We finely describe the "coming down from infinity" for birth and death processes which eventually become extinct. Our biological motivation is to study the decrease of regulated populations which are initially large. Under general…

The literature documents the effects of the pandemic on birthrate, birthweight, and pregnancy complications. This study contributes to this growing body of research by examining multiple facets of the phenomenon. Using the 2012-2022…

It is known that the time until a birth and death process reaches a certain level is distributed as a sum of independent exponential random variables. Diaconis, Miclo and Swart gave a probabilistic proof of this fact by coupling the birth…

Forest-fire and avalanche models support the notion that frequent catastrophes prevent the growth of very large populations and as such prevent rare large-scale catastrophes. We show that this notion is not universal. A new model class…

This paper aims to assess the effects of industrial pollution on infant mortality between the years 1850-1940 using full count decennial censuses. In this period, US economy experienced a tremendous rise in industrial activity with…

For birth and death chains, we derive bounds on the spectral gap and mixing time in terms of birth and death rates. Together with the results of Ding et al. in 2010, this provides a criterion for the existence of a cutoff in terms of the…

We establish connections between the absorption probabilities of a class of birth-death processes with killing, and the stationary tail of a related class of birth-death processes with catastrophes. The major ingredients of the proofs are a…