This paper studies the evolution of deliberate fertility control in fourteen historic German villages between 1700 and 1900. The fertility response to infant and child mortality and exogenous fluctuations in rye price are used as measures of the existence and extent of deliberate non-parity...

European countries in which mothers are encouraged to remain in the labour market have higher fertility levels. It is difficult, however, to link specific policies to fertility increases. We hypothesize that policy changes do not affect fertility decisions in the short term as long as external...

This paper studies the relationship between characteristics of men’s place of residence and the probability of entering marriage in western Germany during the 1980s and 1990s. We link micro-information from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (GSOEP) with district-level data to estimate...

This paper examines the relationship between work and family among men in Western Germany. We investigate the extent to which a difficult start in working life and insecurities during the working life affect men’s transition to fatherhood, and how this effect is influenced by...

The purpose of this article is to show recent trends in regional migration from East to West Germany by combining data from the Statistisches Bundesamt from 1991 to 2002 with data from the Zentrales Einwohnerregister der DDR from 1989 to 1990. We document that annual gross outmigration rates...

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...

We investigate how leaving the parental home differs between three countries with different welfare-state and housing systems: the USA, the Netherlands and West Germany. Using longitudinal survey data, we examine the transitions of leaving home to live with and without a partner. We find that,...

This paper compares the non-marital birth pattern in France and West Germany. Since the beginning of the eighties, France witnessed a steady increase in non-marital birth rates, while in West Germany non-marital birth rates have remained at a relatively low level. We attribute these differences...

Period marriage rates have been falling dramatically in most industrial societies since the beginning of the 1970s. As has been shown in the literature, part of this decline is due to the postponement of marriage to later ages. However, the change in variance has been ignored so far. In the case...