East Germany: Engineers gain prestige

Weight gain in two adult cohorts in East and West Germany reunification.

BACKGROUND Several epidemiological studies have shown consistently higher prevalence rates of obesity and overweight in East German adults compared to West German adults before German reunification in 1990. If different lifestyle factors after German division contribute to these differences, one might speculate that trends of obesity and overweight in the East and West after German reunificatio...

The slow decline of East Germany

Article history: Received 14 August 2007 Revised 8 July 2008 Available online 23 August 2008 JEL classification: J61 J64 E24 P23 R11 O33

Church and State in East Germany

Prestige Versus

How closely does stature (reputation) correspond to objective measures of actual performance? In the following article, reprinted from Social Science Quarterly, 1 James A. Christenson, Department of Sociology, University of Kentucky, Lexington, and Lee Sigelman, now dean. Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences, University of Arizona, Tucson, compare impact-factor data from the Social Science...

East Germany Overtakes West Germany: Recent Trends in Order-Specifi c Fertility Dynamics

Some 20 years after unification, the contrast between East and West Germany provides a unique natural experiment for studying the persistence of communist-era family patterns, the effects of economic change, and the complexities of the process of fertility postponement. After unification, fertility rates plummeted in the former East Germany to record low levels. The number of births per year fe...