Demographic Applications of Event History Analysis

Event history analysis - the study of individual life histories - has developed rapidly over the past few years. This book illustrates the use of the new techniques at the frontier of the subject. The number of surveys undertaken throughout the world to collect detailed information on the timing of events in individual lives (eg fertility surveys, migration histories) have increased, and new methods to analyse such data have developed. Unresolved technical and practical issues remain, and researchers have limited experience of the new techniques - this volume addresses these issues and provides information on the new methodologies. The book covers three main areas. First, it summarizes the work on the incorporation of unmeasured heterogeneity into the analysis of event histories; secondly, it introduces a series of 'competitions' in which pairs of teams are assigned to analyse the same topic using the same data; finally, it discusses other methodological issues such as the treatment of missing data, the analysis of current-status data, and the relation between discrete and continuous time models.