Bruno Arpino

• PhD in Applied Statistics
• Full Professor at University of Padua

This article aims to answer to what extent fertility has a causal effect on households’ economic wellbeing—an issue that has received considerable interest in development studies and policy analysis. However, only recently has this literature begun to give importance to adequate modelling for estimation of causal effects. We discuss several strateg...

The authors examined whether the provision of child care helps older adults maintain better cognitive functioning. Descriptive evidence from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (n = 5,610 women and n = 4,760 men, ages 50–80) shows that intensively engaged grandparents have lower cognitive scores than the others. The authors show t...

The use of multilevel models for the estimation of the propensity score for data with a hierarchical structure and unobserved cluster-level variables is proposed. This approach is compared with models that ignore the hierarchy, and models in which the hierarchy is represented by a fixed parameter for each cluster. It is shown, by simulation, that s...

BACKGROUND It is well known that the provision of public childcare plays an important role for women labour force participation and its availability varies tremendously across countries. In many countries, informal childcare is also important and typically provided by the grandparents, but its role on mothers’ employment is not yet well understood....

Young people leave the parental home at different ages, and differences exist both between and within societies. To explain this heterogeneity, differences in earnings and employment, education and family formation are popular candidates. Comparative research has emphasised the importance of institutional arrangements, in particular the way state w...

This paper examines how caregiving influences employment transitions among employed mid-life adults (50–69 years) who began providing non-professional care on a daily basis to someone inside or outside their household. Using data from the Survey of Health Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) from 2004 to 2017, we apply a difference-in-difference...

Loneliness became an increasing concern during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially as countries enacted “physical distancing” mitigation measures. Under these conditions, older adults with limited family availability (e.g., unpartnered, childless, and “kinless”) might have been at higher loneliness risk, or perhaps were more accustomed to less social...

The digital divide is the gap among population sub-groups in accessing and/or using digital technologies. Typically, older people show a lower propensity to have a broadband connection, use the Internet, and adopt new technologies than the younger ones. Motivated by the analysis of the heterogeneity in the use of digital technologies, we build a bi...

Objectives We provide recent and detailed estimates of the prevalence of kinlessness (i.e., people lacking [close] kin) among older individuals in 27 countries. We add to the literature by considering a broad range of kinship ties and examining within-country variabilities by age, sex, education, and rurality of the residential area. Methods Using...

Objective The goal of this brief report is to analyze parent‐adult child contact frequency in intact and non‐intact families by focusing on parent and child gender and the type of contact. Background Parental separation increases gender differences in parent–child relationships, with separated fathers having less frequent contact with their adult...

In this paper, we examine how non-formal caregiving affects one’s ability to work. We compare care regimes to see if contextual differences in labour market transitions relate to non-formal caregiving patterns among mid-life adults (50–64 years). Using the Survey of Health Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) from 2004–2017, we assess whether no...

Les données recueillies au début de la pandémie de Covid-19 révèlent des effets contrastés sur le nombre de naissances en Europe. Cette note de recherche compare les tendances régionales du taux global de fécondité (TGF) avant et après le début de la pandémie dans les quatre pays européens les plus peuplés : l’Allemagne, l’Espagne, la France et l’I...

Background and Objectives Volunteering is an important dimension of successful aging. Although prior studies have found that personal resources such as health and financial situations are associated with volunteering, there is a lack of research exploring the relationship between resource changes and volunteering. Here, we investigated whether chan...

Background and Objectives Volunteering is an important dimension of successful aging. Although prior studies have found that personal resources such as health and financial situations are associated with volunteering, there is a lack of research exploring the relationship between resource changes and volunteering. Here, we investigated whether cha...

Social scientists have long been interested in how attitudes and values influence fertility intentions and behaviors. The role of political ideology has, on the contrary, been overlooked. Right-wing people tend to be more religious, to hold more traditional views on gender roles and on the importance of the family. Therefore, right-wing people may...

Studies have shown that retired older adults are more likely to volunteer than their working counterparts. However, whether the transition to retirement is associated with increased volunteering frequency and whether this varies according to material and time resources of participants is unclear. We used four waves of data from the longitudinal Sur...

We consider estimating the effect of a treatment on a given outcome measured on subjects tested both before and after treatment assignment in observational studies. A vast literature compares the competing approaches of modelling the post-test score conditionally on the pre-test score versus modelling the difference, namely, the gain score. Our con...

Objective The goal of this brief report is to analyze the association between parental separation and parent-adult child contact frequency, by focusing on parent and child gender and the type of contact.Background Parental separation increases gender inequality in parent-child relationships, with separated fathers having less frequent contact with...

Social scientists have long been interested in how attitudes and values influence fertility intentions and behaviors. The role of political ideology has, on the contrary, been overlooked. Right-wing people tend to be more religious, to hold more traditional views on gender roles and the importance of the family. Therefore, right-wing people more li...

This study examines gender inequalities in the degree of engagement in social clubs of older people and how women’s participation relates to their empowerment at the country level. Combined individual-level data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) and country-level data from the Women’s Political Empowerment Index (WP...

We investigate (a) how the proportion of European grandparents providing childcare changed over a period of 15 years, (b) how these proportions differ by gender and education, and (c) how countries not covered in earlier analyses fit into previously identified regional patterns of grandparental childcare in Europe. Using data from Waves 1, 2, and 8...

Objectives: Previous evidence about the impact of parenthood on health for older adults is mixed, perhaps due to variation in number of children and context. Higher numbers of children could lead to support or strain, depending on individual and country contexts. Yet, no studies currently exist that examine associations between number of children...

The prior literature suggests that older adults, in particular, may benefit from social media use in terms of increased well-being because social media facilitate family communication. Although, social media’s potential for increasing well-being among older adults has been recognized, it has not been rigorously explored. In this study, we test whet...

In nowadays digitalised societies the use of the Internet is increasingly important in our daily lives. Despite the persistent age digital divide, a growing number of older adults is connected to the Web and regularly uses the Internet. Understanding the implications of internet use for productive ageing is thus of increasing relevance. We focus on...

The family plays a central role in shaping health behaviors of its members through social control and support mechanisms. We investigate whether and to what extent close kin (i.e., partner and children) matter for older people in taking on precautionary behaviors (e.g., wearing a mask) and vaccination during the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe. Drawing...

The Oxford International Handbook of Family Policy has two main aims: to identify key developments globally in regard to the forms and modalities of relevant policies, and to take a critical look at the developments regarding those policies. The overall goal is to uncover the extent to which concerns about the family and the role and practices of p...

This paper examines the role of the community context in the estimation of the effect of fertility on households’ economic wellbeing in rural Vietnam. Contextual characteristics can strongly influence both fertility and economic wellbeing and therefore it is crucially important to account for them in order to draw valid causal inference. The multil...

Background Self-rated health, a subjective health outcome that summarizes an individual’s health conditions in one indicator, is widely used in population health studies. However, despite its demonstrated ability as a predictor of mortality, we still do not full understand the relative importance of the specific health conditions that lead responde...

Childcare arrangements are key in women’s ability to juggle motherhood and working outside the home. As such, the study of the access to childcare and its use is of great policy relevance. We focus on a particular kind of informal childcare, the one provided by grandparents. Empirically, assessing the effect of grandparental childcare is not an eas...

This study accounts for the heterogeneous consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic on fertility plans and behaviours, by focusing on the motivations for suspended pre-Covid fertility plans and on those for new fertility plans that arose during the pandemic. We rely on unique data collected with a repeated cross-sectional survey conducted in April/May...

Older adults with non-traditional family structures (unpartnered and childless) may be at higher risk for loneliness. Yet, experiences of loneliness during COVID-19 can vary depending on a country’s context (e.g., culture, demography, COVID-19 mitigation policies, severity of the pandemic). We explore associations between older Europeans’ family st...

This study investigates the association between objective and subjective indicators of economic uncertainty, generated by the COVID-19 health and economic crisis, and young Italians’ fertility plans during the 2020. We use unique repeated cross-sectional data, collected at different time points during the pandemic (March and October/November 2020)...

This work investigates the link between grandmothers’ participation in the labour market during adult life (between ages 18 and 49) and their provision of grandparental childcare later in life. Our contribution is twofold. First, we consider the Italian case, that despite its reliance on informal care has been under-researched. Second, we test two...

This thematic collection seeks to reflect and push forward the current state of the art in the study of grandparenthood and grandparenting in Italy in a comparative European perspective. Starting from the demography of grandparenthood, intergenerational transfers, contacts and living proximity between grandparents, parents and children and the char...

Objectives Policies aiming at reducing rates of hospitalization and death from coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) encouraged older people to reduce physical interactions. In England, until July 2021, provision of care for grandchildren was allowed only under very limited circumstances. Evidence also suggests that reduced face-to-face interactions...

Older adults' engagement in various prosocial activities is a salient question in present-day societies that aim to promote active ageing. However, there are only a few studies focusing on associations between several types of prosocial activities, and they have rarely considered help to relatives and friends separately. Moreover, there is lack of...

Objective: This descriptive study aims to analyse the association between childlessness and voting turnout. Methods: We used the first nine rounds of the European Social Survey and logistic regression models to estimate the association between childlessness and having voted in the last national elections using data from 38 countries. Results: Our r...

Does politics conflict with love? We aim at answering this question by examining the effect on union dissolution of partners’ (mis)match on political preferences, defined as self-reported closeness, intention to vote, or vote for a specific party. Previous studies argued that partners’ heterogamy may increase risk of union dissolution because of di...

Experiencing a change in partnership status at older ages might have detrimental effects on an individual's habits, including eating behaviours. Prior studies presented evidence that widowhood is related to altered diets with a decrease in the amount of protein consumed, which is considered to be an important risk factor of frailty among older peop...

COVID-19 mitigation efforts had the potential to exacerbate loneliness among older adults, particularly for the unpartnered or childless, yet specific studies on loneliness among these groups during the COVID-19 pandemic are lacking. Using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) collected before (October 2019-March 2...

The broad defnition of intergenerational contact includes not only meeting face-toface, but also the important element of communication at a distance, such as via telephone. With the pervasion of the Internet and electronic devices, digital contact has become another increasingly important option. We examined digital contact between grandparents an...

Grandparents play an important role in their family's lives. However, little is known about the demography of grandparenthood. Given dramatic recent changes in fertility, we explore the role of number of children and age at first birth in the timing of the transition into grandparenthood focusing on Italy, a country with well-known North-South fert...

The family plays a central role in shaping health behaviors of its members through social control and support mechanisms. We investigate whether and to what extent close kin (i.e., partner and children) have mattered for older people in taking on precautionary behaviors (e.g., physical distancing) and vaccination during the COVID-19 pandemic in Eur...

The family plays a central role in shaping health behaviors of its members through social control and support mechanisms. We investigate whether and to what extent close kin (i.e., partner and children) have mattered for older people in taking on precautionary behaviors (e.g., physical distancing) and vaccination during the COVID-19 pandemic in Eur...

While early evidence of the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on births has suggested a depressive effect on fertility intentions and behaviours, not all individuals have equally suffered the indirect consequences of the pandemic, and especially those related with the increased uncertainty brought by the economic recession. This study accounts for the...

COVID-19 caught the world unprepared, and its consequences are raising far-reaching demographic dilemmas. In this paper we look at the relationship between the General Fertility Rate (GFR) and economic uncertainty. The GFR is calculated using monthly data on births from the Short-Term Fertility Fluctuations data series on 17 European countries from...

Life-course studies have shown that early-life conditions predict health and socio-economic status in adult life. This study analyzes whether experiencing a traumatic event in childhood, i.e., the Second World War (WW2), affects subjective survival probabilities (SSPs). We rely on a representative sample of European adults who were differentially e...

Objectives Policies aiming at reducing rates of hospitalisation and death from COVID-19 encouraged older people to reduce physical interactions. For grandparents in England, this meant that provision of care for grandchildren was allowed only under very limited circumstances. Evidence also suggests that reduced face-to-face interactions took a toll...

Although it is well-known that care responsibilities are strongly gendered also in later life, the consequences for older women of juggling work and care responsibilities are understudied. This study contributes to fill this gap by focusing on the wellbeing implications for older European women of combining work and grandchild care. The role strain...

Contacts with children represent one of the most important sources of support for older individuals. By using panel data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), I investigate to what extent use of the Internet is related to the frequency of contacts with children, especially those living at a distance. Asymmetric fixed e...

Policies aiming at reducing rates of hospitalisation and death from Covid-19 encouraged older people to reduce their physical contacts. For grandparents in England, this meant that provision of care for grandchildren was allowed only under very limited circumstances. To date, evidence on changes in grandparenting during the pandemic is scarce and l...

This study contributes to the literature on union dissolution by adopting a machine learning (ML) approach, specifically Random Survival Forests (RSF). We used RSF to analyze data on 2,038 married or cohabiting couples who participated in the German Socio-Economic Panel Survey, and found that RSF had considerably better predictive accuracy than con...

Early evidence shows mixed effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on births in Europe. This study examines changes in births at the regional level in the four European countries that have been affected by the pandemic earlier and to a larger extent. It is also investigated the association between birth changes and some labour market characteristics, the...

Objective: This article offers a theoretical and empirical contribution to the fertility literature by considering the role of risk tolerance in the fertility decision making process. Background: Despite a long tradition in fertility research emphasizing the great uncertainty underlying the decision to have children, the role of risk tolerance has...

Objectives Several studies have shown that retired older adults volunteer more than their working counterparts. However, there is a lack of research detecting whether the transition to retirement increases the frequency of volunteering over time and the extent to which this potential effect of retirement varies between sociodemographic groups.Metho...

Intergenerational contacts have been broadly defined to include not only face-to-face relations as an important element of associational solidarity but also contacts at a distance, e.g., via telephone. With the spread of the Internet and of digital devices, digital contacts become another increasingly important option. We examined digital contacts...

Although it is well-known that care responsibilities are strongly gendered also in later life, the consequences for older women of juggling work and care responsibilities are understudied. This study contributes to fill this gap by focusing on the wellbeing implications for older European women of combining work and grandchild care. The role strain...

Objectives: COVID-19 mitigation efforts had the potential to exacerbate loneliness among older adults, particularly for the unpartnered or childless, yet COVID-19 loneliness among these groups remains unstudied. Methods: Using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) collected before (October 2019- March 2020) and dur...

This study examines the influence of grandparenthood and grandparental childcare on loneliness among Chinese older adults. Using longitudinal data from a nationally representative sample of 9240 individuals from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS), we applied logistic regression to examine the relationship between various gr...

Life course research emphasizes that health and wellbeing at older ages are influenced by experiences occurred in the previous stages of life. Several studies have focused on fertility and partnership histories and health at older ages, but fewer have examined subjective wellbeing (SWB), especially using a holistic approach. Another strand of the l...

In this article, we propose an original matching procedure for multiple treatment frameworks based on partially ordered set theory (poset). In our proposal, called matching on poset‐based average rank for multiple treatments (MARMoT), poset theory is used to summarize individuals' confounders and the relative average rank is used to balance confoun...

While the literature has widely shown that the provision of childcare by grandparents is often crucial for young mothers’ participation in the labour market, this work investigates the link between grandmothers’ participation in the labour market during adult life (between ages 18-49) and their provision of grandparental childcare later in life. Tw...

Background: Fertility decisions, as all life actions, imply a balancing of anticipated costs and benefits whose expectations are formed under uncertainty. Fertility research has addressed the backward reasonings (e.g., socioeconomic, psychological, biological factors) influencing fertility decisions. Yet, the role of forward factors, such as the pr...

The restrictions to physical contacts that have been imposed in different countries to deal with the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic may have contributed to an increase in feelings of depression on top of other negative consequences of the pandemic. This study examines the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on feelings of depression...

Physical distancing is intended to mitigate the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. However, the impact of a decrease in face-to-face contacts on non-physical social contacts of older people remains unclear. In particular, we focus on intergenerational contacts that are especially relevant for older people's mental health. Our analyses rely on an onlin...

The health and economic crisis generated by the COVID-19 pandemic is unprecedented in recent human history. We investigate the role of objective and subjective indicators of economic uncertainty due to the COVID-19 crisis in young Italians’ fertility plans during the year 2020. We use unique repeated cross-sectional data, collected at different tim...

El objetivo del trabajo es, tomando como referencia la revolución de género, explorar si la desigual participación relativa en la provisión de recursos económicos y la realización de las tareas domésticas en el hogar se asocia con diferencias en los niveles de satisfacción con la vida para las mujeres y hombres adultos que conviven en pareja en Esp...

This study investigates the impact of non-intensive and intensive supplementary grandparental child care on grandparents’ involvement in leisure activities. Three aspects of leisure activities are investigated: the number/frequency of activities, with whom they are carried out and the subjective satisfaction with them. Beside the possibility of a c...

Objectives: Provision of grandchild care has been found to be associated with a youthful subjective age. Yet, previous studies on this topic were cross-sectional and ignored the increasing proportions of older people growing old without the opportunity to become a grandparent. This study investigates the effects of childcare to grandchildren and t...

This article aims at contributing to the literature on fertility decision making process. The authors analyze an overlooked but potentially crucial factor, the preference for risk. A typology of fertility decision making process based on risk tolerance and attractiveness of parenthood is proposed. Empirically, the authors rely on a lottery question...

We consider estimating the effect of a treatment on the progress of subjects tested both before and after treatment assignment. A vast literature compares the competing approaches of modeling the post-test score conditionally on the pre-test score versus modeling the difference, namely the gain score. Our contribution resides in analyzing the merit...

Childless older adults may be at risk for poorer health cross-nationally, yet most studies on this topic analyze only a small number of countries and only 1 or 2 health outcomes. To our knowledge, two papers exist that explore associations between childlessness and multiple indicators of health using data from a large number of regionally diverse c...

OBJECTIVE This study offers a descriptive overview of changes in fertility plans during the COVID- 19 crisis in a sample of the young population (18–34) in Italy, Germany, France, Spain, and the United Kingdom. The data were collected between 27 March and 7 April 2020. RESULTS Our results show that fertility plans have been negatively revised in al...

In this paper we consider the problem of estimating causal effects in a framework with many treatments through a simulation study. We engage in Monte Carlo simulations to evaluate the performance of inverse probability of treatment weighting (IPTW) with 10 treatments, estimating the propensity scores using Generalized Boosted Models. We assess the...

Keeping physical distance is intended to mitigate the spread of the Sars-CoV-2 virus. However, the impact of a decrease in face-to-face interactions on non-physical social contacts of older people remains unclear. In particular, we focus on intergenerational contacts that are particularly relevant for older people’s mental health implications. Our...

Background and objectives: With the goal of slowing down the spread of the Sars-CoV-2 virus, restrictions to physical contacts have been taken in many countries. We examine to what extent intergenerational and other types of non-physical contacts have reduced the risk of increased perceived depressive feelings during the lockdown for people aged 5...

Significance Several factors have been examined that contribute to the unequal impact of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in terms of lethality and prevalence of cases across different geographical areas. Among them, intergenerational relationships (e.g., coresidence and contacts between family members of different generations) have been suspect...

The COVID-19 pandemic has limited individuals’ possibility to meet and socialize with others due to the state of emergency restrictions to movements, events and relations imposed in different countries. Most shops and restaurants have been closed and some economic activities have been seriously damaged. This significant disruption may have contribu...

Background: Spousal loss is one of the most traumatic events an individual can experience. Studies on behavioral changes before and after this event are scarce. Objective: This study investigates gender differences in pathways of volunteering before and after transition to widowhood among older adults in the United States. Methods: We use longitudi...

This study offers an overview on changes in fertility plan during the COVID-19 crisis of a representative sample of the young population (18-34) in Italy, France, Germany, Spain and UK. Data were collected between March 27 and April 7, 2020. Our results show that fertility plans have been negatively revised in all countries, but not in the same way...

The SARS-CoV-2 virus, originated in Wuhan (China) at the end of 2019, rapidly spread in more than 100 countries. Researchers in different fields have been working on finding explanations for the unequal impact of the virus, and deaths from the associated disease (COVID-19), in different geographical areas. Demographers and other social scientists,...

The paper investigates the change in the impact of democracy on political trust in national and international institutions, the European Union (EU) and to the United Nations (UN), after the start of the Great Recession 2008. Based on empirical evidence, the paper argues that the impact of the level of democracy on national trust is different from i...

Although reciprocity of intergenerational support has been widely considered in family studies, empirical investigations utilizing panel data are still rather scarce. This study used data from four waves of the German Family Panel (pairfam), which were collected in two-year intervals between 2009 and 2016. We examined whether the frequency of recei...

Background: Difficulties with work‒family reconciliation contribute to explaining the low participation of women in the labour market and low fertility levels in several developed countries. Understanding how much different types of childcare can help mothers to balance family and work is crucial for implementing ad hoc policies. Objective: This s...

Objective Time discounting preference (TDP) is a trait indicating to what extent individuals prefer immediate but lower benefits versus future but higher benefits. It can also be interpreted as the inclination to be more or less impatient. TDP has been found to influence different human decisions, including health behaviour and schooling investment...

Objectives: No previous study to our knowledge has examined the association between childlessness and health using a wide range of countries and health outcomes. This study improves previous literature by examining the relationship between "childlessness" (1=childless for any reason, 0=parent of biological, step, or adopted child) and health acros...

Objectives: Although the majority of older people are grandparents, little is known on whether and how the transition into grandparenthood affects their well-being. Moreover, evidence on whether the order of the transition, the time since grandchild's birth, and the socio-demographic characteristics of the offspring modify the grandparental well-b...

Due to the increasing central role of grandparenthood in later life, sound knowledge about its effects on older people’s health is more and more important. This paper examines the impact of becoming a grandparent, having more grandchildren, and engaging in grandchild care on depressive symptoms. Moreover, based on the structural ambivalence theory,...

Background The majority of empirical studies focus on a single Social Determinant of Health (SDH) when analysing health inequalities. We go beyond this by exploring how the combination of education (micro level) and household arrangements (mezzo level) is associated with self-perceived health. Methods Our data source is the 2014 cross-sectional da...

Propensity score matching (PSM) and propensity score weighting (PSW) are popular tools to estimate causal effects in observational studies. We address two open issues: how to estimate propensity scores and assess covariate balance. Using simulations, we compare the performance of PSM and PSW based on logistic regression and machine learning algorit...