The second demographic transition (SDT) theory highlights how nontraditional family behaviors first emerged in Nordic countries and diffused elsewhere. Cross‐national variations in approval of such behaviors across educational groups and changes over time remain underexplored, however. Using European Social Survey data (2006, 2018) from 21 countries, we examine approval of voluntary childlessness, nonmarital cohabitation, nonmarital childbearing, parental divorce, and mothers working with young children. Approval was widespread for cohabitation, nonmarital childbearing, and maternal employment, but voluntary childlessness and parental divorce were less accepted. Country differences did not always align with SDT predictions: Nordic countries showed the highest approval, followed by Southern Europe, where Spain and Portugal align with SDT progress, but Cyprus remains conservative. There is notable diversity in Western Europe—Belgium and the Netherlands showed approval similar to Nordic countries, while German‐speaking countries displayed lower approval. Eastern Europe is polarized: Poland and Slovenia exhibit greater approval, while Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, and Slovakia remain less aligned. Educational differences vary by behavior: clear gradients exist for divorce and women's employment, whereas differences for other behaviors are modest. Over time, educational differences for nonmarital cohabitation and childbearing narrowed in Southern and Eastern Europe but remained stable in Nordic countries and Western Europe.

On the one hand, higher education can encourage childbearing through the income effect. On the other hand, it also raises opportunity costs, potentially reducing fertility through the substitution effect. Although the traditionally negative association between education and fertility has been attributed to these costs, recent findings suggest more nuanced, parity‐specific patterns. In this context, we pursue two objectives: (1) to examine the overall association between educational attainment and parity‐specific completed fertility and (2) to investigate whether—and how—country‐level work–family support moderates this relationship. We use data from the Generations and Gender Survey (GGS‐II) and conduct meta‐analyses and meta‐regressions using macrolevel indicators. Corroborating previous evidence on educational parity polarization, education is generally positively associated with having 1–2 children (vs. childlessness) and consistently negatively associated with having 3+ children (vs. 1–2). Moreover, in countries with stronger work–family support, the positive income effect of high (but not medium) education relative to low education more strongly outweighs its negative substitution effect. This mechanism operates either by strengthening the positive association at lower parities or by weakening the negative association at higher parities. We contribute to the literature by examining how country‐level work–family support moderates the association between education and parity‐specific (rather than overall) completed fertility.

Highlights Wildfire exposure during pregnancy harms birth outcomes in Spain. Wildfire exposure lowers birth weight and raises the risk of low birth weight and preterm birth. Impacts are uniform across sociodemographic groups. Both fire proximity and fire-driven PM2.5 affect birth outcomes.

Highlights We propose a new method to decompose cohort health expectancy by age and cause. We develop a new attribution method for longitudinal data. This method handles interval censoring, semicompeting risks, and time-dependent covariates. We derive explicit formulas for stepwise decomposition of cohort health expectancy. We provide an R package and Shiny app to support use of the proposed method.

Highlights This is the first longitudinal study in an LMIC setting of employment changes following childbirth. A large (40%), short-term decrease in maternal employment (i.e., penalty) was observed after childbirth. A moderate (8–10%), long-term maternal employment penalty was observed after childbirth. Women in high-quality salaried jobs experienced the greatest employment penalties. The employment penalty has grown over time as the share of women in salaried jobs has increased.

Highlights Refugee women are distinctively disadvantaged and fare worse than other migrants. Childcare access substantially improves the integration of Ukrainian refugee mothers in Germany. Childcare boosts mothers’ employment, use of language courses, language proficiency, and host-country social contacts. Childcare programs are an untapped policy lever for the integration of refugee mothers.

Highlights This is the first study to examine the link between extreme temperatures and unclaimed deaths in New York City. Daily air and wet-bulb temperatures were paired with public burial records. A 1°F hotter 7-day summer period predicts 1.2% more unclaimed deaths. Decedents on extreme heat days in NYC were up to three times as likely to go unclaimed.

Scholarship often treats two dimensions of meritocracy as interchangeable: if success is due to hard work, poverty must be due to a lack of effort. We contrast elites’ perceptions about their own success with their perceptions about the lack of success of others. We posit that these two dimensions—merit of self and merit of others—are distinct, with different implications for redistributive preferences, and varying salience across national contexts. Using data from elite surveys in Brazil and South Africa, we examine whose merit matters for giving income to policies (transfers) versus taking income from policies (taxation). We show that elites are more likely to credit their own success to hard work than to attribute poverty to lack of effort, and that these two dimensions are independent. Perceiving the poor as effortless, rather than elites as hard-working, predict opposition to transfers. In contrast, elites' perceptions of self play a context-dependent role. In Brazil, they are associated with opposition to taxation but are confounded with political identification, while in South Africa, redistributive preferences are structured primarily by racial identification. We interpret these cross-national differences considering distinct trajectories of state-building and inequality.