Studies that have investigated the role of unemployment in childbearing decisions have often provided conflicting results. We argue that many of the inconsistencies of prior research may be attributed to a neglect of group-specific differences in behavior. In this study, we examine how the...

This special collection of Demographic Research is devoted to the issue of how economic and employment uncertainties relate to fertility and family dynamics in Europe. The collection is based on contributions to a workshop held in Berlin in July 2009, which in turn was stimulated by the onset of...

This paper investigates the role of female earnings in childbearing decisions in two very different European contexts. By applying event history techniques to German and Danish register data during 1981-2001, we demonstrate how female earnings relate to first, second and third birth rates. Our...

There has been a lot of demographic research concerning the relationship between education and fertility. Most studies, however, focus on the level of education and do not include the field of education. Our paper shows that the field of education serves as a better indicator of a woman’s...

In their recent ASR article on the sex composition of previous offspring and third births in the US, Pollard and Morgan (2002) argue that changes in the societal gender system - namely increasing opportunities for women - have lead to a decreasing effect of children´s gender on parents´...

The purpose of this paper is to provide a comparative overview of recent trends and patterns in childbearing in the three Scandinavian countries: Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. We use indexes pro-duced by applying event-history techniques to register data of the three countries in order to...

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

This paper deals with psychological determinants of fertility differentials in East Germany in the 1990s. We test the explanatory and statistical power of psychological covariates in an event-history model of first-birth intensities together with other covariates. We show that different...

There is a growing body of literature that looks at the causes of below-replacement fertility in developed countries. While the variation in childbearing patterns across countries and between socio-economic groups within a country has been studied in detail, little is known about the differences...

In this paper, we investigate the reproductive behavior of young women and men in Kyrgyzstan, with special emphasis on the demographic adjustment strategies of internal migrants in this post-Soviet Central Asian republic. We employ event-history techniques to data from the “Marriage,...