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We consider how exchanges of support between parents and adult children vary by demographic and socio-economic characteristics and examine evidence for reciprocity in transfers and substitution between practical and financial support. Using…
Biological age is an important sociodemographic factor in studies on academic careers (research productivity, scholarly impact, and collaboration patterns). It is assumed that the academic age, or the time elapsed from the first…
Aggregated health data such as claims data from health insurances become more and more available for research purposes. Estimates of excess mortality from prevalence and incidence of a chronic condition have only been possible for ages 50…
We study a population of $N$ individuals evolving according to a biparental Moran model with two types, one being advantaged compared to the other. The advantage is conferred by a Mendelian mutation, which reduces the death probability of…
Online genealogy datasets contain extensive information about millions of people and their past and present family connections. This vast amount of data can assist in identifying various patterns in human population. In this study, we…
Extensive post reproductive lifespan (PRLS) is observed only in a few species, such as humans or resident killer whales, and its origin is under debate. Hypotheses like mother-care and grandmother-care invoke strategies of…
\noindent The modal age at death is an increasingly used measure for understanding longevity and mortality patterns. However, existing estimation methods focus on point estimates, overlooking the inherent variability and uncertainty in…
Family history is usually seen as a significant factor insurance companies look at when applying for a life insurance policy. Where it is used, family history of cardiovascular diseases, death by cancer, or family history of high blood…
At the physiological level, aging is neither rigid nor unchangeable. Instead, the molecular and mechanisms driving aging are sufficiently plastic that a variety of diverse interventions--dietary, pharmaceutical, and genetic--have been…
Why are life trajectories difficult to predict? We investigated this question through in-depth qualitative interviews with 40 families sampled from a multi-decade longitudinal study. Our sampling and interviewing process were informed by…
Mendelian randomization uses genetic variants to make causal inferences about a modifiable exposure. Subject to a genetic variant satisfying the instrumental variable assumptions, an association between the variant and outcome implies a…
Mendelian randomization (MR) is a natural experimental design based on the random transmission of genes from parents to offspring. However, this inferential basis is typically only implicit or used as an informal justification. As…
We consider a population of N individuals, whose dynamics through time is represented by a biparental Moran model with two types: an advantaged type and a disadvantaged type. The advantage is due to a mutation, transmitted in a Mendelian…
Lifespan distributions of populations of quite diverse species such as humans and yeast seem to surprisingly well follow the same empirical Gompertz-Makeham law, which basically predicts an exponential increase of mortality rate with age.…
Does bearing children shorten a woman's life expectancy? Several demographic studies, historic and current, have found no such effect. But the Caerphilly cohort study is far the most prominent and frequently-cited, and it answers in the…
We define a model for the joint distribution of multiple continuous latent variables which includes a model for how their correlations depend on explanatory variables. This is motivated by and applied to social scientific research questions…
For many applications of agent-based models (ABMs), an agent's age influences important decisions (e.g. their contribution to/withdrawal from pension funds, their level of risk aversion in decision-making, etc.) and outcomes in their life…
Many life-history traits, like the age at maturity or adult longevity, are important determinants of the generation time. For instance, semelparous species whose adults reproduce once and die have shorter generation times than iteroparous…
Estimating the long-term effects of treatments is of interest in many fields. A common challenge in estimating such treatment effects is that long-term outcomes are unobserved in the time frame needed to make policy decisions. One approach…
Standard evolutionary theories of aging and mortality, implicitly based on assumptions of spatial averaging, hold that natural selection cannot favor shorter lifespan without direct compensating benefit to individual reproductive success.…