Essays in Population Dynamics and Life Course

The topic of this thesis is population dynamics (natural population change and migration) and connection between life course events (childbirth, partnership, marriage, and migration) in Europe. The topics of ageing, mortality, fertility, and migration in Europe have received considerable scholarly attention at the country level. Yet population dynamics are largely unexplored at the subnational level while policies addressing population change in Europe have not been assessed through the wholistic lens of population dynamics. Life course events are known to follow each other to a certain degree, yet the connection between life course events still calls for exploration. The goal of this thesis is to contribute to the understanding of the connection between different life course events and demonstrate the population dynamics and its connection to population policies in Europe. We look at the population dynamics and policies in Europe and then proceed to explore the relationship between life course events in Central and Eastern Europe. We finish with an investigation of the association of family statuses and migratory experience with subjective well-being measures in Belarus. We create an interactive map of average population dynamics in Europe using the Eurostat data. We also fit seemingly unrelated bivariate ordered probit as well as ordered logistic regression to the Generations and Gender Survey data from Central and Eastern Europe. The key findings are the following. We find that the centre-periphery principle holds nationally and supranationally where urban areas and Western and Northern Europe exhibit population growth whilst rural areas and Central and Eastern Europe as well as Southern Europe have more depopulating regions. We establish a negative association between pro- natalist policies and population resilience to demographic change. We also find that a positive association between family formation events (marriage and childbearing) and spatial mobility in Central and Eastern Europe. Lastly, the findings from Belarus suggest that a combination of family statuses and categories of (dis-)advantage (gender and migration status) are linked to subjective well-being outcomes more significantly than separate determinants. In general, looking at the population dynamics and policies and the associations between life course events as well as their connection to subjective well-being sheds light on the complexity of life course in Europe. In future work, this approach of interconnectedness may lead to a research agenda encompassing additional demographic outcomes and broader research in life course.