Assorted Links

1. The world’s largest subway system goes cashless as Shanghai Metro adopts QR code
   
   
   
   
2. Fitness tracking app Strava data gives away location of secret US army bases
   
   
   
   
3. Marriages have on average long lasting positive effects on well-being and life satisfaction HT Cesar Hidalgo I cannot confirm nor deny
   
   
   
   
4. Most Americans didn't approve of Martin Luther King Jr. before his death
   
   
   
   
5. Sprawling Mayan 'cities' uncovered under Guatemala jungle using LIDAR data - "The study estimates that roughly 10 million people may have lived within the Maya Lowlands"
   
   
   
   
6. What factors are associated with population projection accuracy? by Guangqing Chi and Donghui Wang
   
   
   
   
7. The World's 15 Most Complex Subway Maps and our cognitive limits: "Multimodal transportation systems in large cities have thus already exceeded human cognitive limits and, consequently, the traditional view of navigation in cities has to be revised substantially"
   
   
   
   
8. The total seasonal snowfall in the continental US for 2017–Jan 2018, shown as a relief map. Beautiful dataviz by Garrett Dash Nelson
   
   

Chart of the Day

Parents now spend twice as much time with their children as 50 years ago, except in France. Via The Economist.

Household composition in London: age and spatial distribution

This is a quite nice way to put a lot of info in a concise and beautiful figure. It comes from ‘The Information Capital’, a book by James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti.

click on the image to enlarge it

Where do women have Maternity leave and Who pays for it

Where do women get Maternity leave and Who pays for it Cc @simonhedlin @lisawade #maternityleave pic.twitter.com/Jv5oRSU3Dr

— Urban Demographics (@UrbDemogrphics) September 19, 2015

How Gay Marriage Became Legal in the US, State by State, Year by Year

Quick post: Gay Marriage became legal in all of the US states today!

The Supreme Court on Friday said that same-sex couples had a constitutional right to marry, effectively requiring that the 13 states that prohibit such unions reverse those bans. Over the last two years, the number of states authorizing gay marriage had expanded rapidly because of legislative decisions, referendums or court orders.

[image credit: Haeyoun Park for the NYT]

Paid Maternal Leave Around the World

Via The New York Times

Related Links:

• Economic incentives and the timing of births: evidence from the German parental benefit
• 4 million Euros for New Demography Programme on Fertility
• Has Divorce Become a Pro-Natal Force in Europe
• The relationship between Civil Unions and fertility in France

Assorted Links

1. Road pricing: What’s not to love?
   
   
2. Top 20 things politicians need to know about science and Top 20 things scientists need to know about policy-making (ht Paulo Nascimento)
   
   
3. Turning-point years in history according to the most frequent dates used dissertation titles
   
   
4. Up all night to get data, a music parody
   
   
5. San Francisco Aerial Views. 1937-1938
   
   
6. Urban street networks, a comparative analysis of ten European cities
   
   
7. Declining fertility rates will transform the Asian family
   
   
8. Coldest spot on Earth identified by satellite (minus 93.2 Cº)
   
   
9. Snapshot: Global Migration
   
   
10. African polygamy over space and time

Latin American Cohabitation Boom 1970-2007

This week we had the visit from Prof. Toni Lopez here at Ipea, who gave us a very nice workshop on IPUMS (I'll write a post about IPUMS later). Toni also presented a paper he and colleagues published last year at PDR. Here is the paper :

ESTEVE, Albert; LESTHAEGHE, Ron; LOPEZ-GAY, Antonio (2012) The Latin American Cohabitation Boom, 1970-2007, Population and development review, 38- 1, pp. 55–81

Abstract:

The article describes the rise of unmarried cohabitation in Latin American countries during the last 30 years of the twentieth century, both at the national and regional levels. It documents that this major increase occurred in regions with and without traditional forms of cohabitation alike. In addition, the striking degree of catching up of cohabitation among the better-educated population segments is illustrated. The connections between these trends and economic (periods of high inflation) and cultural (reduction of stigmas in ethical domains) factors are discussed. The conclusion is that the periods of inflation and hyperinflation may have been general catalysts, but no clear indications of correlation were found between such economic factors and the rise in cohabitation. The shift toward more tolerance for hitherto stigmatized forms of conduct (e.g., homosexuality, euthanasia, abortion, singleparent household) is in line with the rise of cohabitation in regions of Argentina, Chile, and Brazil where cohabitation used to be uncommon. Further rises in cohabitation during the first decade of the twenty-first century are expected in a number of countries (e.g., Mexico) despite conditions of much lower inflation.

Figure 2 - Patterns in the rise of the share of cohabitation among all unions of women aged 25–29 in regions of Latin American countries, various censuses 1970–2000

[click on the image to enlarge it]

Source: Esteve et al (2012)

Media Exposure and Reproductive Behavior

Three papers discussing the effects of media exposure on reproductive behavior.

Ferrara et al (2008). Soap Operas and Fertility: Evidence from Brazil. IDB Working Paper Nº 533 *

Chong and La Ferrara (2010). Television and divorce: Evidence from Brazilian novelas. J. European Economic Association.

Westoff and Koffman (2011). The Association of Television and Radio with Reproductive Behavior. Population and Development Review.

*A  funny  curious finding: "the likelihood that the twenty most popular names chosen by parents for their newborns would include one or more names of the main characters of novelas aired that year was about 33 percent if the area where parents lived received the Globo signal and only 8.5 percent if it did not."

Related Links:

• Baby Deficit and Economic Crises
• Fertility Transition in Brazil
• Birth rate plummets in Brazil
• Updated: How Electricity, Development, and TV Reduce Fertility

Assorted Links

1. Book Demographic Change and Housing Wealth
   
   
2. Mapa interactivo de la población extranjera en Barcelona (movilidadyurbanismo)
   
   
3. Politics in the US and the Return of Ayn Rand
   
   
4. What Makes Paris Look like Paris?  (HT Joao Meirelles)
   
   
5. Marital Status and the Recession in the USA
   
   
6. Why are Global CO2 Emissions Soaring? (via Duncan Smith)
   
   
7. A map of road crashes in Great Britain - 1999-2010 (via Michael Batty)

Some marriage and divorce statistics

Ok! now back fom the honeymoon to the real world. Something tells me I shouldn't be much enthusiastic about this (I refer to the real world....) So this is just a fast post with some links to marriage and divorce statistics:

1. More or Less (Tim Harford) talks about the decreasing marriage rate in the UK and other wedding-related statistics.
2. An interesting article by Jacob Langenfeld (NewGeography) on divorce and demographics by state in the US.
3. The journal Population, Space and Place has just published this paper: Spatial Variation in Divorce and Separation: Compositional or Contextual Effects? (by Hill Kulu). In fact, I can't recommend the paper. I've been recommended by my wife not to read it.
4. Recent marriage and divorce trends in the US (FlowingData)