Demographic responses to short-term stress in a 19^th century Tuscan population: the case of household out-migration

This paper deals with the relationship between household emigration and short-term crisis in a rural community of mid-19th century Tuscany. Based on a detailed reconstruction of individual and household life-histories, the paper shows the close relationship between household emigration and different kinds of short-term stresses, either economic, epidemiologic or within the household. Despite the different response by SES - with the poorest strata of the population much exposed to price changes and mortality crisis - the death of the household head appears as one of the most powerful factor of household emigration

Demographic responses to short-term stress in a 19th century Tuscan population: The case of household out-migration

This paper deals with the relationship between household emigration and short-term crisis in a rural community of mid-19th century Tuscany. Based on a detailed reconstruction of individual and household life-histories, the paper shows the close relationship between household emigration and different kinds of short-term stresses, either economic, epidemiologic or within the household. Despite the different response by SES - with the poorest strata of the population much exposed to price changes and mortality crisis - the death of the household head appears as one of the most powerful factor of household emigration.emigration, household, Italy, sharecropping, short-term stress

Health and socio-demographic conditions as determinants of marriage and social mobility

This paper makes use of data collected from military registers and marriage certificates for the population of Alghero, in Sardinia, for the period 1866-1925, with the aim of investigating the role played by physical characteristics and health in the possibility of social mobility through marriage. Our findings demonstrate that, whereas physical defects and ill health had little impact on the chances of marrying an illiterate woman, these factors did have a negative effect on the chances of marrying a woman who was literate. In a context in which intergenerational social mobility remained limited and the family had the final say on marriage arrangements, it is likely that only healthy individuals were selected for marriages regarded as strategic for the purposes of forming and strengthening family alliances, and/or improving the social position within the community.health, marriage, Sardinia, social mobility

Son Preference in a Sharecropping Society: Gender Composition of Children and Reproduction in a Pre-Transitional Italian Community

Before the demographic transition, were couples able to control their fertility? Can we find evidence for this by comparing households with different occupations, in which the sex composition of the offspring may reveal a preference for children of a given sex and reproductive behaviours that differ in response to economic factors? To address this question, Matteo Manfredini, Marco BresCHi and Alessio fornasin make use of an original database on the fertility of nineteenth-century Tuscan families that combines information from parish registers and from a local census of inhabitants. They compare the probability of further births according to the sex composition of surviving children, focusing on four social groups: day labourers, sharecroppers, smallholders and non-agricultural occupations. The authors find evidence that sharecroppers tended to favour large families in order to secure a male heir

Deaths and survivors in war: The Italian soldiers in WWI

OBJECTIVE The aim of this paper is to study the selection effects of mortality among soldiers in WWI. METHODS Individual-level data of more than 62,000 soldiers born between 1874 and 1899 in north-eastern Italy was used. Almost 10% of these soldiers died in the war. A data set was constructed by linking two different sources, the call-up registers and the Roll of Honour of the fallen Italian soldiers of WWI. RESULTS The risk of death of soldiers in war depended partly on the soldier\u2019s assignment to corps and partly on personal behaviour and individual characteristics. A relatively small number of soldiers of large body size fell in battle. The most universal cause of death was illness. Literate soldiers were less likely to die in captivity. CONTRIBUTION The concept of mortality differential has rarely been applied to soldiers engaged in conflict. This is because they were supposed to experience similar perils and run similar risks during the war. However, our study found evidence of strong mortality differentials among soldiers, which were strictly associated with the striking differences in terms of literacy, education, and socio-economic status that permeated the Italian society of that time and that the universal enrolment allowed to highlight

One day is not as good as another…at least not across the entire territory of Italy: an analysis of the differences in the daily distribution of births across Italian macro-regions, 1999–2016

Abstract The concentration of births on working days compared to a relative lack of events at weekends or during public holidays has been interpreted in literature as evidence of an excessive appeal to elective delivery. The World Health Organization has repeatedly expressed concerns about the abuse of this practice. We investigate the daily distribution of births in Italy in the period 1999–2016 to answer the following question: In addition to the weekend effects found in other countries, do popular beliefs about "unlucky" days also influence the calendar of births? We assume that without the effects exerted by the working calendar and/or by popular beliefs, the births should be equally distributed between the days of a month. We interpret the equal distribution as the expected one. This allows us to calculate a daily excess of births with respect to the expected number. We evaluate, by the means of multivariate regression, the impact of public holidays and of popular beliefs on the daily excess of births. In addition to working calendar effects, we found a depressing effect exerted by the 17th day of each month in all Italian territories. Indeed, the number 17 is considered extremely unlucky by popular tradition in Italy. We believe that these findings are indicative of a systemic abuse of elective delivery, especially in Southern Italy. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to analyze the effect of irrational beliefs on the calendar of births

Male partner choice in Sardinia, late 19th-early 20th century

This paper makes use of data collected from military registers and marriage certificates for the population of Alghero, in Sardinia, for the period 1866-1925, with the aim of investigating the role played by physical characteristics and health in the possibility of social mobility through marriage. Our findings demonstrate that, whereas physical defects and ill health had little impact on the chances of marrying an illiterate woman, these factors did have a negative effect on the chances of marrying a woman who was literate. In a context in which intergenerational social mobility remained limited and the family had the final say on marriage arrangements, it is likely that only healthy individuals were selected for marriages regarded as strategic for the purposes of forming and strengthening family alliances, and/or improving the social position within the community

A micro-analytical investigation of reproductive behaviour in Italy during the Fascist period

Between the late 1920s and the early 1930s, in line with what was happening in numerous European countries, the fascist regime in Italy instigated a series of measures aimed at combating the decline in fertility. Using individual data on four communities with different socio-economic characteristics taken from the Census of 1961, this study aims to verify if the regime's propaganda campaign and regulative measures to boost the birth-rate had any real impact within particular segments of the population. The study shows that there was only a modest recovery in the birth rate for a short period. These increases can be partly attributable to the policies activated from 1937 that prompted a significant increase in the marriage rate. apart of this little effect, individual-level analysis has revealed no increase in the birth-rate connected by the regime's policy

Performance analysis of the toroidal field ITER production conductors

The production of the superconducting cables for the toroidal field (TF) magnets of the ITER machine has recently been completed at the manufacturing companies selected during the previous qualification phase. The quality assurance/quality control programs that have been implemented to ensure production uniformity across numerous suppliers include performance tests of several conductor samples from selected unit lengths. The short full-size samples (4 m long) were subjected to DC and AC tests in the SULTAN facility at CRPP in Villigen, Switzerland. In a previous work the results of the tests of the conductor performance qualification samples were reported. This work reports the analyses of the results of the tests of the production conductor samples. The results reported here concern the values of current sharing temperature, critical current, effective strain and n-value from the DC tests and the energy dissipated per cycle from the AC loss tests. A detailed comparison is also presented between the performance of the conductors and that of their constituting strands

Investigation of gender differences in stillbirths in Italian regions at the turn of the nineteenth century

AbstractData quality issues have hindered the analysis of the determinants of stillbirths in the years following Italian unification. By exploiting panel data techniques to take into account the possible effect of stillbirth misreporting, this paper investigates the relationship between seasonal agricultural workload and the number of male and female stillbirths in the Italian regions at the turn of the twentieth century (1883–1913). We found that although stillbirth rates were lower for females, agricultural workload seasonality had a more substantial effect for them. We suggest that this finding may be rationalised through the adaptive sex ratio adjustment hypothesis