Malthusian behaviour of the critical and subcritical age-dependent branching processes with arbitrary state space

Abstract

For the age-dependent branching process with arbitrary state space let M(x, t, A) be the expected number of individuals alive at time t with states in A given an initial individual at x. Subject to various conditions it is shown that M(x, t, A)e–at converges to a non-trivial limit where α is the Malthusian parameter (α = 0 for the critical case, and is negative in the subcritical case). The method of proof also yields rates of convergence.