Husbands' Dominance in Decision-Making About Women's Health: A Spatial Diffusion Perspective in Sub-Saharan Africa.

This article maps spatial and temporal variation in husbands' dominance in decision-making about their wives' health using pooled Demographic and Health Surveys from 28 countries in sub-Saharan Africa in an earlier (i.e., 2001-2005) and later (i.e., 2010-2014) period. First, we use adaptive bandwidth kernel density estimation to show how aggregate country-level estimates of husbands' decision-making dominance mask enormous spatial heterogeneity within countries. Our maps also reveal a geographic clustering of cells with similar levels of husband's decision-making dominance both within and between countries. Next, we use panel fixed-effects spatial regression methods to show that decreases in husbands' decision-making dominance in neighboring cells are associated with decreases in husbands' decision-making dominance in the reference cell. These findings support a diffusion explanation for declines in husbands' decision-making dominance over time. Our analyses also indicate that schooling and urbanization may be important channels through which diffusion occurs, which we speculate is because these are places where people are exposed to new ideas and gender norms.

The effects of growing-season drought on young women's life course transitions in a sub-Saharan context.

In spite of the vast importance of weather shocks for population processes, limited work has investigated the micro-level processes through which weather shocks influence the transition to adulthood in low-income contexts. This paper provides a conceptual overview and empirical investigation of how weather shocks impact the timing, sequencing, and characteristics of young women's life course transitions in low-income rural settings. Drawing on the case of Malawi, we combine repeated cross-sections of georeferenced Demographic and Health Survey data with georeferenced climate and crop calendar data to assess how growing-season drought shocks affect young women's life course transitions. Discrete-time event history analyses indicate that in this context, exposure to growing-season drought in adolescence has an accelerating effect on young women's transitions into first unions-both marriage and cohabitation-and into first births within unions.

Demographic science aids in understanding the spread and fatality rates of COVID-19.

Governments around the world must rapidly mobilize and make difficult policy decisions to mitigate the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Because deaths have been concentrated at older ages, we highlight the important role of demography, particularly, how the age structure of a population may help explain differences in fatality rates across countries and how transmission unfolds. We examine the role of age structure in deaths thus far in Italy and South Korea and illustrate how the pandemic could unfold in populations with similar population sizes but different age structures, showing a dramatically higher burden of mortality in countries with older versus younger populations. This powerful interaction of demography and current age-specific mortality for COVID-19 suggests that social distancing and other policies to slow transmission should consider the age composition of local and national contexts as well as intergenerational interactions. We also call for countries to provide case and fatality data disaggregated by age and sex to improve real-time targeted forecasting of hospitalization and critical care needs.

The Causal Effect of Maternal Education on Child Mortality: Evidence From a Quasi-Experiment in Malawi and Uganda.

Since the 1980s, the demographic literature has suggested that maternal schooling plays a key role in determining children's chances of survival in low- and middle-income countries; however, few studies have successfully identified a causal relationship between maternal education and under-5 mortality. To identify such a causal effect, we exploited exogenous variation in maternal education induced by schooling reforms introducing universal primary education in the second half of the 1990s in Malawi and Uganda. Using a two-stage residual inclusion approach and combining individual-level data from Demographic and Health Surveys with district-level data on the intensity of the reform, we tested whether increased maternal schooling reduced children's probability of dying before age 5. In Malawi, for each additional year of maternal education, children have a 10 % lower probability of dying; in Uganda, the odds of dying for children of women with one additional year of education are 16.6 % lower. We also explored which pathways might explain this effect of maternal education. The estimates suggest that financial barriers to medical care, attitudes toward modern health services, and rejection of domestic violence may play a role. Moreover, being more educated seems to confer enhanced proximity to a health facility and knowledge about the transmission of AIDS in Malawi, and wealth and improved personal illness control in Uganda.