In the new era where rapid population ageing has become a fundamental national condition, cultivating positive ageing attitudes is pivotal to achieving “Healthy Ageing” and “Active Ageing” in China. However, existing research largely relies on cross-sectional data and thus fails to reveal the dynamic evolutionary mechanisms of ageing attitudes over the life course or their underlying structural logic. Ageing attitudes reflect both older adults' internal perceptions of senescence and society's valuation of the elderly, and their developmental trajectories critically shape quality of life in later years.

Drawing on life course theory—with a specific focus on random variability, trajectory divergence, and cumulative advantage/disadvantage—and using three waves of panel data (2014, 2020, and 2023) from the China Longitudinal Aging Social Survey (CLASS), this study employs hierarchical linear growth models to systematically examine the dynamic evolution, dimensional differentiation, and social stratification effects of ageing attitudes among Chinese older adults. It addresses three core questions: whether ageing attitudes change with advancing age, whether inter-individual divergence intensifies or mitigates over time, and how educational attainment and urban-rural residence shape these developmental trajectories.

Three key findings emerge. First, ageing attitudes exhibit significant dimensional divergence. Self-related ageing attitudes become markedly more negative with advancing age, reflecting the negative impact of embodied experiences such as functional decline; conversely, general ageing attitudes shift significantly toward positivity, shaped by the discourse of successful ageing. This creates a cognitive distinction characterised by a “self-negative, group-positive” pattern. Second, the evolution of ageing attitudes presents a complex pattern of trajectory divergence but level convergence. While substantial random variation exists in initial levels and rates of change, the trajectories follow an evolutionary mode of “rapid decline from high starting points, slow change from low starting points”. Consequently, the gap between high-initial and low-initial groups progressively narrows as the ageing process unfolds, demonstrating an “equalising effect” inherent in late-life development. Third, education and residence exert opposing moderating effects onthe initial level and rate of change of ageing attitudes. Although older adults with upper secondary education or higher and those in urban areas start with more positive ageing attitudes, they experience a significantly faster rate of decline than their less-educated and rural counterparts. The latter group, despite lower initial levels, shows greater psychological resilience and improving trends, thereby substantially reducing psychological inequality across social groups over time.

These findings challenge the classical life course premise that cumulative advantage/disadvantage inevitably leads to persistent divergence. It provides robust empirical evidence from the Chinese context for a “psychological rebalancing mechanism” in advanced old age, whereby the universality of objective ageing realities weakens the persistence of early-life resource advantages, and the tension between subjective expectations and objective realities drives convergence in ageing attitudes. Theoretically, this study integrates structural position and psychological agency, offering a more integrated understanding of late-life psychological development. Practically, it suggests that ageing policies should shift from focusing on “starting-point equity” to emphasising “process-oriented intervention”, distinguish between self-related and general dimensions for targeted implementation, and establish dynamic trajectory-based evaluation mechanisms to build a more inclusive and process-sensitive governance system for ageing.

Since the enactment of the Compulsory Education Law in 1986, China has achieved remarkable progress in educational development, transitioning to high-quality population development. However, due to its immense demographic scale, out-of-school adolescents (OOSA) remain substantial, reaching 14.24 million in 2020. Understanding OOSA's demographic evolution is essential for mitigating social governance risks and unlocking human capital potential. Utilizing data from four waves of China's National Population Census (1990-2020), this study examines the longitudinal evolution and emerging characteristics of OOSA aged 10-19 across demographic composition, spatial mobility, urban-rural distribution, and labor market participation.

The research reveals four critical shifts. First, the demographic composition of OOSA has undergone a structural transformation. Overall, OOSA are predominantly aged 15 and above (beyond compulsory education), and the primary stage of educational attrition has shifted from primary/lower secondary to lower/upper secondary completion. Notably, in recent years, the size and share of OOSA within the compulsory education age group (10-14) has rebounded from 2.24 million (3.0%) in 2010 to 3.92 million (4.6%) in 2020. Boys face higher dropout risk, leading to an increasingly male-skewed ratio among OOSA, while girls who leave school face a significantly higher risk of early marriage.

Second, the spatial distribution of OOSA is being restructured. While 73.8% hold rural Hukou, over half (55.3%) are now urban-dwelling. The proportion of OOSA living in urban areas is nearly 10 percentage points lower than that of all adolescents. By age group, urbanization of OOSA aged 10-15 is similar to peers, but for those aged 16-19, the gap in urbanization rates relative to all adolescents widened from 5.3 percentage points in 1990 to 20.3 percentage points in 2020, indicating a clear lag.

Third,OOSA spatial mobility has intensified, with sustained concentration in eastern regions. There is a robust correlation between inter-provincial migration and out-of-school status. In 2020, 30.9% of OOSA were migrants, up from 2.6% in 1990. The proportion of inter-provincial migrants among OOSA has consistently been much higher than that among all migrant adolescents. In recent years, although adolescents' opportunities to attend high school and college have increased, institutional barriers to cross-regional school progression for migrant adolescents have not eased, leading some inter-provincial migrant adolescents to drop out directly in their destinations.

Fourth, labor market participation of working-age OOSA (16-19) has undergone a structural transition. Employment rates declined from 83.4% in 2010 to 76.4% in 2020. The association between employment and migration has strengthened: by 2020, migrant OOSA's employment rate was 34.2 percentage points higher than that of non-migrants. Moreover, OOSA employment has shifted from primary to secondary and tertiary industries. In 2020, the tertiary sector accounted for 53.9% of employed OOSA, becoming their main employment field.

Based on these findings, the study concludes that policy interventions for OOSA must evolve toward a comprehensive governance framework focused on human capital accumulation and social support, including: promoting diverse and inclusive basic education options; improving lifelong education to enhance re-education accessibility; reforming education finance and resource supply to remove barriers to schooling for migrant adolescents and facilitate their enrollment and progression; seizing digital intelligence era opportunities to build stratified employment and skills support; and supporting OOSA's social integration and stable development by incorporating them into community-based social work services.

As China's population ageing deepens, addressing demographic shifts while advancing common prosperity has become a key policy concern. The silver economy is expected to balance economic growth with social welfare improvement, and is widely believed to play a coordinating role between promoting economic growth and enhancing social welfare. However, its specific moderating mechanism in the relationship between population ageing and common prosperity remains underexamined. Existing research focuses mainly on the macroeconomic consequences of population ageing or explores the silver economy from an industrial perspective, with few studies integrating both aspects within a unified analytical framework. Drawing on the Neo-Cambridge growth model and the overlapping generations (OLG) model, this paper constructs an integrated framework encompassing population ageing, the silver economy, and common prosperity. Using data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) and related sources from 2012 to 2022, this study systematically investigates the interrelations and underlying mechanisms among these three dimensions.

The main findings are as follows. First, population ageing has a significant positive effect on common prosperity, and the silver economy further strengthens this positive effect. Second, the silver economy reinforces the promoting effect of population ageing on common prosperity through three primary channels: optimizing the structure of primary distribution, reducing reliance on government transfer income, and promoting labor participation. These mechanisms operate across both market and government dimensions, reflecting an evolutionary shift from government-led to market-led dynamics. Third, the positive moderating effect of the silver economy exhibits significant heterogeneity. This moderating effect is more pronounced among younger olderhouseholds and urban older households, indicating that the silver economy's moderating effect does not yet have a distinct pro-poor orientation.

By incorporating the silver economy, this study offers a new theoretical perspective on the relationship between population ageing and common prosperity, thereby broadening the research horizon on common prosperity. Its marginal contributions are threefold. First, it extends research on the driving mechanisms of common prosperity by addressing the insufficient attention paid to endogenous market forces. Second, by integrating population ageing, the silver economy, and common prosperity into a unified analytical framework, it reveals the context-dependent nature of demographic shifts' economic consequences, moving beyond the one-sided claim that “ageing inevitably undermines development performance”. Third, using micro-level household data, it overcomes the masking effect of macro-aggregated data on distributional inequality and identifies how the silver economy's moderating effect varies across different population groups, thereby complementing studies on the complexity of governing an ageing society.

The findings provide important policy implications.First, in advancing common prosperity, undue concern about the adverse effects of population ageing is unnecessary. Instead, greater attention should be paid to the structural enabling role of the silver economy. Second, the transition from a government-led to a market-led pathway to common prosperity should be strengthened, alongside better coordination between market-based wage income growth and social security sharing, guiding the silver economy to play a sustained role in optimizing primary distribution, reducing transfer income reliance, and promoting labor participation. Third, the positive moderating effects of the silver economy should be made more inclusive and pro-poor so as to accelerate common prosperity progress among oldest-old households and rural older households.

As population ageing deepens and the strategy of expanding domestic demand advances, how to effectively unlock older adults' consumption potential has become an important issue for fostering new drivers of the silver economy and promoting high-quality economic development. Positive ageing perception is an important concept that has gradually emerged in China's active response to population ageing. It emphasizes understanding an ageing society, older adults and later life from a positive perspective, and regards old age not merely as a stage of decline and social withdrawal, but rather as an important life stage with continued possibilities for development, social participation and value realization. As an important cognitive foundation through which older adults understand later life, assess the meaning of ageing, and allocate resources, positive ageing perception may encourage them to view later life in a more positive and open manner, place greater emphasis on improving quality of life, satisfying spiritual and cultural needs, and realizing self-worth, and thereby affect consumption behavior.

Using data from the 2020 and 2023 waves of the China Longitudinal Aging Social Survey (CLASS), this study examines non-solitary households composed only of cognitively normal adults aged 60 and above. We investigate the overall effect of positive ageing perception on elderly consumption, together with its mechanisms and heterogeneous effects. The results indicate that positive ageing perception significantly increases the level of elderly consumption, and that this effect is mainly driven by improvements in negative cognition. This finding remains robust after changing the specification of the dependent variable, adjusting the sample scope, and addressing potential endogeneity. Heterogeneity analysis further shows that this effect is more pronounced among the young-old, women, those not engaged in grandchild care and those without financial assets. Mechanism analysis indicates that positive ageing perception promotes consumption mainly by reducing precautionary saving, increasing hedonic consumption and expanding consumption channels. In addition, good mental health and participation in elderly education strengthen its positive effect on elderly consumption. Based on these findings, this study suggests fostering positive ageing perceptions, improving the supply of age-friendly products and services, strengthening subsidies and family support for constrained groups, and expanding digital and community-based consumption scenarios to better convert older adults' latent demand into actual consumption and promote the development of the silver economy.

The main contribution of this study lies in introducing positive ageing perception, a distinctly Chinese ageing-related concept, into the analytical framework of elderly consumption and thereby extending the research boundary from the perspective of cognition and values. Moreover, this study not only examines the overall effect of positive ageing perception on elderly consumption, but also further analyzes its mechanisms, heterogeneous effects and extended impacts, thus providing new empirical evidence for understanding how cognitive and attitudinal factors shape the economic behavior of older adults. Based on the findings, it is recommended that coordinated efforts be made to foster a positive social environment for ageing, optimize the supply structure of elderly consumption, strengthen support for effective demand, and expand diverse consumption scenarios, so as to continuously unlock older adults' consumption potential and stimulate the development of the silver economy.

China is undergoing profound demographic transformation characterized by persistently low fertility and rapid population aging. In response, the central government has introduced a series of pro-natalist policies aimed at promoting long-term demographic balance, with increasing attention to the multidimensional determinants of household fertility decisions. Among these determinants, time has emerged as an increasingly scarce and consequential resource in the cost-utility calculus of childbearing, particularly under the contemporary context of prolonged working hours in dual-earner households. As labor market competition intensifies and long working hours become normalized, household time resources are further compressed, potentially reshaping couples' fertility intentions and long-term family planning strategies.

Current research on the fertility-inhibiting effects of overtime work often lacks a family perspective, neglecting the fact that fertility decisions are fundamentally household-level choices shaped by intra-household interactions and joint time allocation. This study advances the literature by shifting the unit of analysis from individuals to couples and examining how different patterns of household overtime work influence fertility intentions through intra-household time coordination mechanisms and external time substitution.

Drawing on data from the 2024 Sampling Survey on China's Population and Family Development, this study constructs a typology of household overtime work patterns based on both spouses' working-hour arrangements and employs Logistic regression models to examine the impact of household overtime work patterns on individual fertility intentions, with particular attention to gender heterogeneity. In addition, we further explore the coordination mechanisms of intra-household time resources, and estimate the effect of marketization level of childcare services as a form of external time substitute from a family perspective.

The results reveal three main findings. First, household overtime work exerts a significant fertility-inhibiting effect, but the magnitude varies by overtime work configuration. Second, gender differencesare pronounced. Women's fertility intentions are more sensitive to household overtime work arrangements, reflecting gender asymmetry in domestic labor responsibilities and time allocation. Third,marketization level of childcare services has only a limited mitigating effect. It only shows significant effects among single-overtime work households, yet is invalid in dual-overtime work households.

This study makes several contributions. Conceptually, it introduces a household-level analytical framework that integrates time allocation theory and gender role theory to explain how cumulative overtime work generates structural time scarcity within families. Methodologically, it operationalizes household overtime work patterns as interactive configurations rather than individual behaviors and explains the mechanism through which overtime work affects fertility decisions from the perspective of reallocation of domestic responsibilities and changes in time allocation between spouses within the family.

These findings suggest that excessive working hours undermine fertility intentions by generating cumulative time scarcity within families and intensifying gendered inequalities in domestic responsibilities. Policies aimed at promoting fertility should therefore move beyond financial subsidies or childcare expansion alone and pay greater attention to working-time regulation, labor market flexibility, and the protection of family time resources. By emphasizing the family dimension of overtime work, this study provides new evidence for understanding the time mechanism of low fertility in contemporary China and for designing more effective family-friendly and fertility-supportive labor market institutions.

Against the backdrop of delayed marriage, increasing singlehood, and the growing prevalence of overtime work, understanding how overtime work shapes young adults' marital decisions has become an issue of both academic and policy importance. This study examines the relationship between overtime working hours and marriage intention, as well as the underlying mechanisms, using data from the 2023 “Specialized Survey on Delayed marriage, Childlessness or Delayed childbearing, and Low fertility Groups” conducted by Renmin University of China. Focusing on unmarried individuals aged 30-49 who engage in overtime work, this paper employs ordered logit models to explore the nonlinear association between overtime working hours and marriage intention.

The results reveal a significant inverted U-shaped relationship between overtime working hours and marriage intention.A moderate level of overtime is associated with higher marriage intention, whereas excessive overtime significantly suppresses individuals' willingness to marry. This finding suggests that the impact of overtime work on marriage intention is not linear but varies by the degree of overtime exposure. Mechanism analysis, grounded in the work-family conflict theory and work-family enrichment theory, shows that overtime work exerts dual and competing influences. On the one hand, excessive overtime increases health pressure and strengthens the salience of work-role identity, both of which crowd out individuals' capacity and willingness to assume family roles. This reflects the work-family conflict effect. On the other hand, overtime work increases individual income, which enhances economic resources and strengthens individuals' bargaining power in the marriage market, thereby raising marriage intention. This reflects the work-family enrichment effect. The empirical results confirm that health pressure, identity salience, and individual income serve as important pathways linking overtime working hours and marriage intention.

Heterogeneity analysis further reveals contextual and gender differences. The inverted U-shaped relationship is statistically significant in non-first-tier cities but not in first-tier cities, possibly because overtime work has become normalized in major metropolitan areas,thereby reducing variation in overtime exposure and individuals' sensitivity to it. In addition, excessive overtime significantly suppresses marriage intention among unmarried women, while the inhibitory effect is not statistically significant among men. This finding is consistent with gender role expectations and the greater work-family conflict typically experienced by women.

This study contributes to the literature in several ways. First, it identifies the nonlinear effect of overtime working hours on marriage intention, offering new empirical evidence on how work time allocation influences marital decisions. Second, by focusing exclusively on individuals who actually engage in overtime work, the study avoids confounding effects from those without overtime exposure and more precisely captures the difference between moderate and excessive overtime. Third, by simultaneously testing the mechanisms of health pressure, identity salience, and individual income, the paper integrates the work-family conflict and enrichment perspectives into a unified explanatory framework. Finally, the findings provide policy implications for promoting work-family balance, improving labor protection, and designing differentiated marriage and family support policies across regions and genders, thereby contributing to sustainable demographic, social, and economic development goals.

Persistently declining fertility has become a major demographic issue in post-industrial societies. After the completion of the first demographic transition, fertility rates in many countries did not stabilize around the replacement level, but continued to decline and exhibited characteristics of the second demographic transition. Household fertility choices, shaped by constraints of cost, time, and risk, have gradually diverged from society's long-term needs for labor supply, market capacity, and balanced population structure. Explaining the mechanism underlying this divergence is the central concern of this paper. From the perspective of the deepening social division of labor, this paper combines theoretical analysis with model-based deduction and traces the historical evolution from traditional agricultural society to the early stage of industrialization and then to the post-industrial stage. It examines the relationships among household functions, firm behavior, and population-scale demand under different forms of division of labor, and reveals the mechanism through which a structural contradiction emerges between household fertility choices and societal population demand.

The study finds that, in traditional agricultural society, the family performed multiple functions of production, consumption, old-age support, and risk protection. A larger household size helped strengthen household production capacity, labor organization, and intergenerational support, making relatively high fertility economically rational under conditions of low productivity and limited external support. In the early stage of industrialization, labor-intensive production and the expansion of intra-firm division of labor increased social demand for labor. Meanwhile, rising household income, declining mortality, and relatively low childrearing costs jointly sustained high fertility. Thus, expanding labor demand and high household fertility formed a positive coupling relationship during the transitional phase of the first demographic transition. In the post-industrial stage, however, the continuous deepening of the social division of labor has externalized household functions of production, security, and care, weakened individuals' economic and functional dependence on the family, and increased the time cost, opportunity cost, and quality-investment pressure of childbearing. As a result, the household's optimal number of children declines. At the same time, firm operation and socioeconomic development still rely on labor supply, consumer markets, and product-variety expansion supported by population size. Society therefore retains a long-term demand for population stability and structural balance. This gives rise to a structural divergence between households' rational low-fertility choices and societal population demand.

The contribution of this paper lies in explaining persistent low fertility and the second demographic transition within the framework of the evolving social division of labor. It further points out, from the perspective of firms' dependence on population size and market capacity, that there is a systematic mismatch between the social benefits of population reproduction and the private costs borne by households. Addressing this contradiction requires shifting fertility costs from being borne solely by households to being reasonably shared by the state, firms, and households. In particular, firms should assume greater responsibility in the fertility support system, so that the benefits and costs of childbearing can be more fairly distributed across social actors and a more coordinated relationship can be established between household fertility decisions and the long-term needs of social development.

Against the background of China's people-centered new-type urbanization, a central policy challenge is how to promote the long-term social incorporation of internal migrants. This issue is especially salient where access to welfare, housing, and local public services remains uneven. Existing studies have identified institutional, social, and individual determinants of migrant incorporation, but have focused mainly on integration levels, linear relationships, and group comparisons. Less is known about how key factors operate through non-linear effects, threshold changes, and interaction mechanisms, and whether different dimensions of integration follow different pathways. To address these questions, this study examines the dynamic mechanisms, non-linear logic, and systemic characteristics of migrant social integration in China.

The analysis uses data from the resident questionnaires of the “Jiexiang Zhongguo” Urban Survey project organized by Renmin University of China in 2023 and 2024. After screening resident-level questionnaires, the study focuses on internal migrants who reside in destination communities but do not hold local hukou, yielding 1839 observations from 31 provincial-level units and 300 cities. The study employs CatBoost to model non-linear relationships and handle missing values, and applies SHAP values to interpret variable importance, marginal effects, and interaction patterns. Recursive feature elimination with cross-validation retains 21 explanatory variables. The benchmark CatBoost model reports an F1 score of 0.75513, an accuracy of 0.75989, and a recall of 0.76766.

The results show that migrant social integration is a composite process shaped jointly by institutional support, residential conditions, spatial mobility, time allocation, and digital participation. Community service satisfaction, insurance coverage, housing property rights, internet use frequency, and living arrangements constitute the main drivers, whereas economic gradient, migration distance, working hours, and destination-city hierarchy constitute the principal constraints. The nine most important variables account for 59.14% of the total contribution. These factors display threshold effects, non-linear marginal changes, and interaction patterns characterized by buffering, substitution, and reinforcement. Interaction analysis indicates that internet use, community services, and insurance coverage can mitigate disadvantages associated with migration distance and economic gradient; that positive conditions may substitute for one another when one support is already sufficient; and that long-distance mobility and long working hours can become more restrictive under certain conditions. Further analysis indicates that structural integration places greater weight on institutional acquisition, organizational participation, and social embeddedness, whereas cultural integration is more closely associated with identity, belonging, subjective acceptance, community service satisfaction, residential stability, and everyday living environments. This distinction shows that “entering urban society” and “identifying with urban society” are not identical processes.

Rather than treating social integration as a single, linearly determined outcome, the analysis specifies its internal differentiation and traces how multiple factors interact under certain conditions. At the theoretical level, it clarifies the internal structure of migrant social integration and distinguishes structural incorporation from cultural incorporation. At the practical level, the findings indicate that promoting fuller migrant incorporation requires coordinated community-based public services, portable social insurance, housing support, digital inclusion, and labor protection, while expanding neighborhood interaction and community participation so that migrants can move from “entering urban life” toward “identifying with urban society.”