Reproductive behavior during the pre-transitional period: evidence from rural Bologna

A subregional analysis of family change: The spatial diffusion of one-parent families across Italian municipalities, 1991-2011

This paper documents the expansion of new family patterns in Italy by scrutinising the spatial diffusion of one-parent families across Italian municipalities for the period 1991-2011. We apply a hierarchical Bayesian model to the data of the last three Italian Population Censuses, acknowledging that variation cannot be broken down into temporal and spatial effects because space-time interaction is at the very heart of family changes. Our results illustrate substantial subregional and sub-provincial heterogeneities in the spatial organisation of family systems, patterns that might have gone undetected had larger territorial units of analysis been considered. In addition, we show that especially socio-economic factors were associated to the diffusion of new family forms. This paper challenges international scholarship that caricatures Italy as a monolithic, homogeneous family-oriented country.

Exploring unobserved heterogeneity in perinatal and neonatal mortality risks: The case of an Italian sharecropping community, 1900-39

Previous researchers have found that traditional determinants explain only a limited part of the variation in perinatal and infant mortality at the family level. In the study reported in this paper, we explored the factors that make the perinatal/neonatal death risk more heterogeneous across families. We estimated logistic regressions with cluster random effects at the maternal level, using data from the Italian village of Granarolo from 1900 to 1939. We estimated the effects of selected predictors on perinatal/neonatal mortality and unexplained inter-family variation. We found that non-rural skilled and lower-skilled workers experienced higher perinatal and neonatal mortality risks. Unexplained heterogeneity at the maternal level was lower for women living in sharecropper families than for those in landless labourer and non-rural worker families. Unexplained perinatal and neonatal mortality components were also due to socio-economic differences and were not necessarily related only to maternal biological features or shared genetic frailty.