Overview
Francesco C. Billari is an Italian demographer whose career has spanned Bocconi University (Milan) and the University of Oxford, where he held the Nuffield Professorship of Sociology before returning to Bocconi as a professor. He is one of the leading European demographers specializing in life-course demography, lowest-low fertility, fertility postponement, and agent-based modeling in the social sciences. His work connects micro-level life-course transitions (entry into unions, parenthood, residential independence) with macro-level demographic outcomes including fertility postponement and convergence/divergence patterns across European countries.
Key Contributions / Features
- Co-authored Billari et al. (2006), documenting the century-long U-shaped trajectory of late fertility in Sweden (1900–2001) using occurrence-exposure rates; showed a behavioral wall at ages 44–45 stable across 30 birth cohorts and modest ART compensatory capacity.
- Co-author of Kohler, Billari, and Ortega (2002), one of the foundational analyses of the emergence of lowest-low fertility (TFR < 1.3) in Southern and Eastern Europe during the 1990s.
- Kohler, Billari, and Ortega (2006, book chapter in The Baby Bust): Co-developed the four-factor causal framework for lowest-low fertility and documented the reversal of cross-country correlations between TFR and female employment, marriage, divorce, and nonmarital births; analyzed negative population momentum and the postponement transition onset criterion.
- Pioneer in applying agent-based modeling and complexity theory to demographic research, bringing computational social science methods to population studies.
- Research on life-course age norms (the social clock), cross-national comparisons of partnership formation and union dissolution, and the connection between educational expansion and fertility postponement in European contexts.
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