Working Papers

Birth order pairings and romantic success
 Seymour Spilerman and Kieron Barclay (2020)

Abstract
The possibility that birth order influences romantic compatibility has long intrigued the lay public.  In the absence of empirical research a marital advise literature has emerged, based on the observations of counselors and clinical psychologists, which purports to explain marital success in terms of birth order pairings.  The present paper has two parts.  In the first, using population register data from Sweden, we investigate the propositions about birth order and romantic relationships that are prevalent in the popular literature and show they have little validity.  In the second, we undertake our own analysis which reveals two major birth order impacts: (a) a pronounced only-child effect, in that couples in which either spouse is an only have a divorce rate notably higher than couples in which neither is an only-child; and (b) for males, a protective effect from divorce from marriage with a first-born female, an outcome that does not hold for females in their own pairing choices.

The pattern of educational inequality - the contribution of family background on levels of education over time and across four countries
 Outi Sirniö, Hannu Lehti, Michael Grätz, Kieron Barclay and Jani Erola (2020)

Abstract
This article analyses the pattern of inequality across levels of education and its evolution over time from a cross-national comparative perspective. We employ a previously disregarded approach of sibling correlations to measure how the contribution of the total family background differs across achieved levels of education. We compare successive birth cohorts in Finland, Sweden, Germany, and the U.S. between 1990 and 2015. We further analyze the extent to which the total contribution of parental background is accounted for by observed parental education. Our results indicate a pattern in which sibling similarity is strongest in the lowest and the highest levels of education in all studied countries. Changes over time were more pronounced in the Nordics and in educational levels other than the lowest. Observed parental education played a less notable role than expected, indicating that using only parental education ignores a substantial portion of the total influence of family background.

Boom, echo, pulse, flow: 385 years of Swedish births
​Tim Riffe, Kieron Barclay,  Sebastian Klüsener and Christina Bohk-Ewald (2019)

Abstract
​Human population renewal starts with births. Since births can happen at any time in the year and over a wide range of ages, demographers typically imagine the birth series as a continuous flow. Taking this construct literally, we visualize the Swedish birth series as a flow. A long birth series allows us to juxtapose the children born in a particular year with the children that they in turn had over the course of their lives, yielding a crude notion of cohort replacement. Macro patterns in generational growth define the meandering path of the flow, while temporal booms and busts echo through the flow with the regularity of a pulse.