His main areas of research include: family, kinship and household demography; ageing; mechanisms for the inheritance of behaviour; mathematical and statistical demography; methods of making and evaluating population and household forecasts; the demography of developed and transitional societies. Recent publications include work on mortality crises in Russia; models for mortality forecasting in elderly populations; European kinship differentials; intergenerational transfers between parents and children; and modelling the long-term effects of assortative mating, feedback mechanisms, and kinship correlations on population size and structure. He has been responsible for courses including Contemporary Population, Family and Health Trends in Developed Societies; Migration; Mathematical and Statistical Demography; Population Dynamics; Statistics and Computing for Demographic Research; and Methods for Population Planning. He has been President of the British Society for Population Studies, and Research Secretary of the Population Investigation Committee. He chairs the Scientific Review Board of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, and has acted as an adviser to a number of British National Government Departments, and to international organisations, such as EU, UN and OECD.