This week in research #84

For the last two days, I've been at the International Population Conference in Brisbane. This conference only happens every four years, so it is like the Olympics of population research. Although I missed the first few days due to teaching, I still managed to see some really interesting research presented. Here are some of the highlights I found from the (last two days of the) conference:

• Isabelle Seguy (extended abstract here) presented a really interesting attempt to reconstruct parish-level population estimates for France for the 1780s, using parish-level data on births, marriages, and deaths that covers about 80 percent of all areas
• Irina Grossman (who was a keynote at last week's New Zealand Population Conference, as I noted last week; extended abstract here) presented estimates of the population living with dementia at the local level for Australia, which involved a combination of population projections with projected changes in dementia prevalence
• James Raymer (full paper here) presented on methods to derive age-sex profiles for net migration (although, funnily, he noted that he wasn't a fan of net migration as a concept, preferring to consider gross migration flows instead)
• James Carey (extended abstract here) presented on methods of measuring structural ageing, built on the 'stationary population model' (this was of particular interest to me, given my previous work in this area)
• Cassio Turra (extended abstract here) also presented on population ageing, focusing on the 'old-age demographic transition' across the world
• Jooyung Lee (extended abstract here) presented estimates of North Korea's declining fertility rate, based on surveys of North Korean refugees, who were asked about the fertility behaviour of their friends and relatives in North Korea, with the resulting estimate of 1.39 births per woman in the 2010s being far lower than estimates by the UN and other agencies

Aside from the conference, here's what caught my eye in research over the past week (a very busy week, so little opportunity to think about other research):

• Kearney and Levine have a new working paper on fertility, which documents rising childlessness at all ages in high-income countries, and finds that short-term changes in income or prices cannot explain the widespread decline, leaving them to conclude that fertility decline is being driven by a broad reordering of adult priorities with parenthood occupying a diminished role