Many coalescent-based methods aiming to infer the demographic history of populations assume a single, isolated and panmictic population (i.e. a Wright-Fisher model). While this assumption may be reasonable under many conditions, several recent studies have shown that the results can be misleading when it is violated. Among the most widely applied demographic inference methods are Bayesian skyli...

To investigate the breeding structure in the Japanese Thoroughbred population, we applied a demographic analysis to the populations of foals produced from 1978 to 2005. The migration rate estimated from the proportion of foals produced by imported breeding horses was around 40% over the investigated period. After early 1990s, the migration rate through stallions imported from USA sharply increa...

The frequency and magnitude of extreme events are predicted to increase under future climate change. Despite recent advancements, we still lack a detailed understanding of how changes in the frequency and amplitude of extreme climate events are linked to the temporal and spatial structure of natural communities. To answer this question, we used a combination of laboratory experiments, field exp...

This article examines the relationship between demographic structure and the level of government spending on K–12 education. Panel data for the states of the United States over the 1960–1990 period suggests that an increase in the fraction of elderly residents in a jurisdiction is associated with a significant reduction in per-child educational spending. This reduction is particularly large whe...

This paper reassesses the nexus between female education, employment and fertility in Nigeria. The four Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) that have been conducted in the country (1990–2008) were analysed. Between 1990 and 2008, the educational status of women improved appreciably and the proportion of illiterate women in the country declined from 57.2 to 35.8 per cent. Multivariate analysis ...

Commonly available survey data for developing countries often do not include income or expenditure data. This data limitation puts severe constraints on standard poverty and inequality analyses. We provide a simple approach to simulate household income based on publicly available Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and macroeconomic data. We illustrate our approach with DHS data for Bolivia, B...

Despite a growing literature documenting strong linkages between income and health, there remains little understanding of how economic factors shape disease outcomes in the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Using individual level data from nineteen sub-Saharan African countries, we show that negative income shocks can lead to substantial increases in HIV prevalence. We match data on individuals’ HIV status fr...

The underlying motivation of this study is to account for the spatial variation of factors affecting women’s access to land, which has been largely ignored by the traditional regressionbased model studies, much to the detriment of spatially varying relationships. Using household and individual-level data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), this study used Geographically Weighted Regr...