John Ermisch is Emeritus Professor of Family Demography. His research is concerned with the structure and dynamics of families and their interaction with wider society. His research has studied the allocation of resources within the family, the transmission of advantage across generations, non-marital childbearing, the interaction of child support and non-resident fathers' contact with their children, the impact of family ties on trust in strangers and the effect of fertility expectations on residential mobility. Recent work has focused on the geographic proximity of parents to children and its relation to the migration patterns of the child generation and in-kind help from them to parents, as well as the reproduction of educational attainments across generations.