Martin Dribe’s research while affiliated with Lund University and other places

We study the economic integration of immigrants from Ottoman Syria and Turkey and their offspring in the United States using full count census data from 1900 to 1940. Immigrants initially achieved occupational premiums due to their selection into high-reward industries, but 1940 earnings data reveals significant and growing disadvantages over time, partly due to lower educational attainment. In contrast, the second generation achieved substantial upward mobility, closing both the education and earnings gaps with native Whites. This contrasts with the experience of Northern European immigrants who matched natives more closely in terms of occupations and earnings.

Urban Lives emphasizes the importance of a micro-level approach in examining the lives of individuals and families in an industrial city, spanning over a century. The work deepens the understanding of major societal shifts and how they are intertwined with demographic behavior over the past 120 years. These societal transformations encompassed groundbreaking advancements in living standards, a relocation of rural populations to urban hubs, and significant alternations in the fabric of everyday working life, ultimately reshaping people’s lives. In conjunction, there were changes in individual life courses, particularly how individuals experienced basic demographic events: births, deaths, marriage, and migration. The volume explores family dynamics, the evolution of health disparities and mortality inequality, the paths of social and economic mobility, and the changing landscapes of immigration and residential segregation. It fills a void in the narrative of twentieth-century demographic, social, and economic history and paints a portrait of how personal choices and behavior were shaped by societal transformation. These shifts, closely linked with industrialization and post-industrialization, coincided with the emergence and culmination of the welfare state. Through the lens of the Swedish industrial city of Landskrona, the volume closes the gap between historical studies and contemporary research, offering original insights into a period seldom explored with a micro-level perspective.

Human evolutionary demography is an emerging field blending natural science with social science. This edited volume provides a much-needed, interdisciplinary introduction to the field and highlights cutting-edge research for interested readers and researchers in demography, the evolutionary behavioural sciences, biology, and related disciplines. By bridging the boundaries between social and biological sciences, the volume stresses the importance of a unified understanding of both in order to grasp past and current demographic patterns. Demographic traits, and traits related to demographic outcomes, including fertility and mortality rates, marriage, parental care, menopause, and cooperative behavior are subject to evolutionary processes. Bringing an understanding of evolution into demography therefore incorporates valuable insights into this field; just as knowledge of demography is key to understanding evolutionary processes. By asking questions about old patterns from a new perspective, the volume—composed of contributions from established and early-career academics—demonstrates that a combination of social science research and evolutionary theory offers holistic understandings and approaches that benefit both fields. Human Evolutionary Demography introduces an emerging field in an accessible style. It is suitable for graduate courses in demography, as well as upper-level undergraduates. Its range of research is sure to be of interest to academics working on demographic topics (anthropologists, sociologists, demographers), natural scientists working on evolutionary processes, and disciplines which cross-cut natural and social science, such as evolutionary psychology, human behavioral ecology, cultural evolution, and evolutionary medicine. As an accessible introduction, it should interest readers whether or not they are currently familiar with human evolutionary demography.

Despite a large literature on the importance of childhood neighbourhoods for life course transitions, there is a lack of fertility studies combining a life‐course perspective with detailed neighbourhood measures. Addressing this gap, we use longitudinal data in which the entire population of a Swedish town is geocoded at the address‐level, 1939–1967, and linked to national registers from 1968 to 2015. We study how social neighbourhoods in childhood influence fertility outcomes by constructing individual neighbourhoods at the address level to measure the social class of nearby childhood neighbours. We analyse the age at first and last birth, children ever born, birth spacing and childlessness. Growing up in higher‐status neighbourhoods is associated with delayed fertility for both men and women, but no association is found for the number of children ever born or for childlessness. Associations are stable over time, and later ages of neighbourhood exposure matter more, especially for men. Contrary to prior literature's focus on the lower classes, our results are driven by higher‐status individuals growing up in distinctly white‐collar neighbourhoods.

The socioeconomic health gradient has widened in recent decades. We study how childhood socioeconomic neighborhood conditions influence gender- and cause-specific adult mortality. Using uniquely detailed geocoded longitudinal microdata for a Swedish town (1939-1967), with a follow-up in national registers (1968-2015), we apply Cox proportional hazards models and estimate individual neighborhoods at the address-level. We find that childhood neighborhood social class has a lasting influence on male adult mortality (ages 40-69), even when adjusting for class position, class origin, neighborhood physical attributes and school districts. This impact was particularly pronounced for preventable causes of death, pointing to lifestyle and behavioral factors as important mechanisms.