The DisCont project has covered all areas that were originally planned, with some expansion towards related and promising avenues of research, and additional results on the discontinuity induced by the Covid-19 pandemic during the final part of the project.
In terms of scientific impact (see list of Output in the 'Publications' section), publications span several disciplines, with general science journals, and top journals in the areas of Demography, Economics, Sociology, Statistics and Psychology, as well as conference proceedings in Computer Science.
Example of major scientific achievements include:
- Francesco C. Billari,"Demography: Fast and Slow", Population and Development Review, 2022. This article has advanced the field of population studies by pointing to the distinction between fast and slow population change, importing measures of population turnover, and introducing an indicator on the role of migration, to the global study of population change.
- Francesco C. Billari, Osea Giuntella, Luca Stella, "Does broadband Internet affect fertility?", Population Studies, 2019. This article has shown for the first time that the digital revolution, and in particular the diffusion of broadband Internet, can act in favour of fertility in low fertility settings, albeit with important social stratification differences.
- Osea Giuntella, Lorenzo Rotunno, Luca Stella, "Globalization, Fertility, and Marital Behavior in a Lowest-Low Fertility Setting ", Demography, 2022. This article has documented, for the first time, the impact of import competition, as a key element of globalization, in low fertility settings.
- Valentina Rotondi, Ridhi Kashyap, Luca Maria Pesando, Simone Spinelli, Francesco C. Billari "Leveraging mobile phones to attain sustainable development", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. This article has documented, for the first time at the global level, the broadly positive impact of the digital revolution on a set of sustainable development outcomes related to population,through a focus on the diffusion of mobile phones.
In terms of methodological developments, researchers based at the University of Oxford, with collaboration from other DisCont members, have mainly worked on statistical methods for the study of population change, and in particular for the
detection of discontinuities. In addition and to support these methodological developments, DisCont members contributed to the development of publicly available software package (called
'apc', available at
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~nuff0078/apc/(si apre in una nuova finestra)) for both the R statistical language and Python. The dissemination of this methodological work is
in line with best practices in the field. Moreover, the project has worked, in collaboration with leading scholars in the field, in the innovative use of 'digital breadcrumbs' data (i.e. data generated on the Internet) for the study of demographic behavior.
In this area, a key example of scientific achievement is:
- Jonas Harnau, Bent Nielsen, "Over-Dispersed Age-Period-Cohort Models", Journal of the American Statistical Association, 2018. This article has introduced a new class of Age-Period-Cohort models without measures of exposure, which is applicable in many fields and areas.
