Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research

Recent study examines differences in male and female fertility

Researchers examine the long-term demographic consequences of the Colombian armed conflict for those who survived the violence

Study reveals imbalanced coverage of global areas in migration research

A look back at a year of research with many highlights

Researchers analyze the human toll of the ongoing conflict using a statistical model that takes data uncertainties into account

When addressing the consequences of demographic change, politicians have primarily focused on increasing the birth rate. Unfortunately, this has not yielded any noteworthy success. In addition, research has not been able to answer the question of how to motivate people to have more children. However, there is another factor that could be used to limit the negative impact of demographic change on pensions: better education.

A swipe to the right, a swipe to the left – never before have there been so many options for finding a partner, at least if you believe the promises of dating apps. But how free is our choice of partner really? And what about deciding whether and when to have children? Julia Leesch and Nicole Hiekel at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research are studying exactly these questions.

More than one-third of the world’s population uses Facebook at least once a month. In the process, Facebook collects a lot of data from its users, which represents a valuable but barely tapped source for scientific research. Emilio Zagheni and his team at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock are using social media data in an attempt to track and predict international migration.

It’s easy to overlook the marginalized. Social exclusion can have very different causes and consequences – also in the context of migration. Six Max Planck Institutes have now joined forces for a cross-institute project focusing on the topic. The project examines, among other things, the question of why immigrants often lose their good health. It explores what prompts Somalis to move from Europe to Kenya, and what consequences the deal between the EU and Turkey might have for the rights of asylum seekers in Greece. Their common aim is to uncover exclusion and develop fair rules to regulate migration.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, parents were suddenly without formal childcare, which put considerable pressure on mothers in particular. A recent study from the MPI for Demographic Research (MPIDR) examines the childcare arrangements changes during the pandemic and the subsequent impact on parents‘ mental health. Mothers who continued to be primarily caregivers for their children reported increased stress and exhaustion during the pandemic. In contrast, fathers experienced mental health benefits when their female partner continued to take the majority of childcare responsibilities.

Little is known about how people spend the last year of their lives. The results of the study show that longer life is associated with a longer dying process and that most deaths are not what is often called a "good" death. Longer life is partly the result of a longer dying process. End-of-life trajectories call for a discussion about how we want to die in an era of increasing life expectancy and ageing societies.

Online genealogy data are beset by a number of biases that affect their representativity. Diego Alburez-Gutierrez from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research and his colleague Robert Stelter show this with the example of a user-generated dataset from the FamiLinx project. They calculate the remaining life expectancy of men aged 30 who lived in the German Empire between 1500 and 1910 and the Netherlands between 1600 and 1909. Their work highlights the need to develop bias-correction methods to analyze historical population trends derived from crowdsourced digital data.

A team including researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research is collecting mortality data in a new database. These data allow to follow the course of the Covid-19 pandemic only a few weeks later. An analysis for 37 high-income countries based on the data has shown that life expectancy decreased in 31 of the countries in 2020. A total of about 28 million more years of life were lost than expected. And the years of life lost associated with the Covid-19 pandemic were more than five times higher than those associated with the seasonal influenza epidemic in 2015. 

Life expectancy in the United States is lagging behind other industrialized nations. Recently, US life expectancy has even decreased. A new study by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research now shows: Mortality from cardiovascular diseases was a more decisive factor for this development than the often-mentioned opioid crisis.