We offer a comparison between the age profiles of risks of formation of marital and non-marital unions in Russia, Romania, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Italy. We show that there is considerable variability across these populations in the level and age pattern of union-entry risks, ranging (i)...

In Western countries, rates of second and third births typically increase with educational attainment, a feature that usually disappears if unobserved heterogeneity is brought into the event-history analysis. By contrast, in a country like Romania, second and third birth rates have been found to...

The Nordic population registers provide a unique possibility to study the demographic behavior of very small population groups and rare events. In this paper, we study the childbearing behavior of Swedish mothers of twins between 1961 and 1999, inclusive. Our most consistent finding is that...

This is the second of two companion papers addressing the association between educational attainment and fertility for some sixty educational groups of Swedish women, defined according to field of education as well as level of education. The first paper is about childlessness and education, the...

In the second part of these reflections, we use the connection between marriage and first childbearing to demonstrate further issues involved in anticipatory analysis. We show that an anticipatory approach cannot be used to represent intentionality: People may marry with the intention of having...

By current European standards, Sweden has had a relatively high fertility in recent decades. During the 1980s and 1990s, the annual Total Fertility Rate (TFR) for Sweden undu­lated consid­erably around a level just under 1.8, which is a bit lower than the corresponding level in France and well...

In this paper we extend the concept of educational attainment to cover the field of education taken in addition to the conventional level of education attained. Our empirical investigation uses register records containing childbearing and educational histories of an entire cohort of women born...

Procedures that seek to explain current behavior by future outcomes (anticipatory analysis) constitute a widespread but problematic approach in life-course analysis because they disturb the role of time and the temporal order of events. Nevertheless the practice is often used, not least because...