The Age Limit Adjustment Act, which was adopted in 2007, constitutes a climax in the developments of a paradigm shift in pension policy towards remaining at work for longer. This development entails profound changes and restrictions on benefits for assured persons. In future, many of the insurable employed will not receive a pension without incurring deductions until they reach the age of 67. Both employers and employees are faced with new challenges if they wish to avoid pension reductions in the event of an early retirement and consequently possible precarious incomes at old age. Especially women need particular support in this regard, given that in structural terms, they are in a weaker position on the labour market.Against this background, a representative nationwide survey of 1,800 female workers born between 1947 and 1964 was commissioned by the New Quality of Work Initiative (INQA) and conducted by the Institute of Gerontology at the Technical University of Dortmund in cooperation with TNS Infratest in 2007. These cohorts are to be affected by the increase of the age limit from 2012 onwards. In addition to structural data, this survey studied the respondents’ assessment of their current ability to work and to continue to work until reaching the standard age limit. Further, the survey explored specific working conditions and strains of work. The results show that more than 40 % of the female respondents are sceptical about the conditions of being able to continue their current work until reaching their statutory age limit. The only moderate to poor workability and the consequential danger of having to leave work result e.g. from work-related strains which accumulate in certain sectors and professional groups. The creation of appropriate jobs for older workers as well as the implementation of a staff policy in companies, which is sensitive to demographic developments and individual circumstances, can contribute to maintaining and nurturing the workability.

The idea of mortality tempo effects derives from the idea of fertility tempo effects, which were introduced by Norman B. Ryder and are widely known and accepted. Given the essential similarity of the ideas, it might be regarded as curious that mortality tempo effects have only recently been recognized and are not as yet generally accepted. The explanation for this may be that mortality tempo effects have implications that seem to be at variance with established ways of modeling and analyzing mortality and population dynamics. This paper develops a discrete approach to describing and analyzing mortality tempo effects. The discrete approach is mathematically undemanding, yet powerful. It is used here, for example, to define age-specific tempo effects. The focus of this work is the measurement of length of life in empirical populations. It is shown that any empirical population may be approximated by a suitably constructed discrete model population.

Empirical evidence of the effects of age on depressive symptoms is mixed, ranging from positive to zero to negative effects, depending on the modelling of the age-depression profile. This paper uses internationally comparative data to analyse the association between age and the prevalence of symptoms of depression, controlling for well-known determinants of mental health. Based on the first wave of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), depressive symptoms of 28,538 persons aged 50 to 89 from eleven European countries and Israel are analysed using a negative binomial regression model. The results indicate that the number of depressive symptoms measured by EURO-D scores increase with age and are higher among women than among men. When including socio-demographic characteristics, health conditions and economic strains, the association between depressive symptoms and age vanishes for men, and even reverses for women. Thus, the association between age and mental health is mediated by the health and living conditions of older persons; age by itself has no explanatory power.

The present study compares parity-specific fertility patterns of West and East German women (from birth cohorts 1970 and younger) after German re-unification using panel data from the GSOEP (waves 1990 through 2006). Whereas the transition rate for the birth of the first child tends to be higher in the East German than in the West German sub-sample, the likelihood of second births remains considerably higher among West German women across time. The analyses presented comprise a detailed comparative test of different intervening mechanisms, represented by sociocultural orientations and social inequalities resulting from the societal transformation process. Although the transition rate to first births among East German women is lowered by their higher education and work aspirations, their higher degree of family orientation promotes their propensity to start a family. Surprisingly, the higher proportion of persons without a denomination in East Germany promotes the transition to parenthood because it accelerates both the engagement in and the consolidation of intimate relationships. The lower transition rate to second births among East German women is partly accounted for by the higher work aspirations, by the lower religiosity and by the lower general life satisfaction in this subgroup.

Since the 1990s, reurbanisation has become an increasingly frequent trajectory for urban development. Many formerly shrinking cities have been able to stabilise their population or even see new growth. Especially prominent in regions like Germany and the UK, but also observed across the whole continent, a lively debate on reurbanisation has developed as a reality of today’s, and a potential trajectory for tomorrow’s, cities in Europe.Postsocialist Europe has not so far been central in the reurbanisation debate, either empirically or theoretically. Subsequently, the postsocialist experience is missing in the discourse and the existing body of evidence. There is, however, some evidence that Czech and Polish cities are also seeing signs of new inner-city growth and a trend towards core city stabilisation.Against this background, the paper scrutinises the issues of reurbanisation and new growth after the shrinking of postsocialist cities. The paper uses the approach of a contrastive comparison between cities in eastern Germany, where reurbanisation has developed as the predominant trajectory for many large cities, and for cities in Poland and the Czech Republic, where this trend is considerably less prominent. It analyses the development of reurbanisation in these cities and their urban regions over the last few decades, its characteristics and the determinants triggering or impeding it. The paper includes data on a national scale as well as from relevant case studies of cities and their urban regions.It argues, among other things, that there is no “postsocialist model” with regard to influencing factors for reurbanisation. Eastern Germany, due to its specific postsocialist situation and transformation trajectory, can be viewed as an “outlier” or “hybrid” which exhibits characteristics typical of postsocialist and western welfare contexts and which is seeing especially dynamic reurbanisation after a phase of extreme shrinkage. Although there are clear signs of inner-city reurbanisation in Polish and Czech cities as well, it seems relatively unlikely that this process will reach the same high levels as in East German cities within the coming years. * This article belongs to a special issue on reurbanisation.

The neighbouring countries France and Germany show very different levels of fertility. Differences also exist between the two regions of East and West Germany. The aim of this paper is to help close a remaining gap in explaining these differences by applying a cultural concept of role models. Data is based on the German survey “Family-related role models” (2012) and the French survey “Situation de couple, intentions de fécondité et opinions sur la famille”, ELIPSS (2013) offering a new approach to measuring the impact of social norms. The analysis uses multinomial logistic regression. We identified role models regarding the acceptance of childlessness on the one hand and large families on the other, as well as regarding the link between marriage and parenthood and the importance of financial security, suggesting different fertility-related cultures in France and Germany. There is a strong predominance of one general role model in France – that of having at least two children. In Germany, in contrast, there is a dominant role model – the two child family – but there are also several less central role models. The dominant model in France even leads to a sort of self-stigmatisation of individuals who want to stay childless, whereas childlessness is generally accepted in Germany. Role model differences between East and West Germany show a lower acceptance of large families and a higher acceptance of single-child families in the East. Our results highlight the importance of role models for fertility intentions as well as the relevance of cultural dimensions when studying the impact of the institutional framework on fertility.