Demographic behaviour is shaped not only by characteristics at the individual level, but also by the context in which individuals are embedded. The Contextual Database of the Generations and Gender Programme (GGP) supports research on these micro-macro links by providing cross-country...

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 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...

Previous analyses of period fertility suggest that the trends of the Nordic countries are sufficiently similar to speak of a common "Nordic fertility regime". We investigate whether this assumption can be corroborated by comparing cohort fertility patterns in the Nordic countries. We study...

The standardised rate of third births declined by over 50 percent in Austria between the late 1970s and the mid-1990s. The third birth was also postponed gradually over the years up through 1991-92, after which the tempo of childbearing suddenly increased in response to a change in the...

In this research note we extend our previous study of the association between educational attainment and permanent childlessness in Sweden (Hoem et al., 2006) to cover Austria, and we make comparisons between the two countries. In both investigations we have defined educational attainment in...

This article explores the relationship between family policies, fertility, employment and care. It suggests that similar family policies are likely to exert different effects in different contexts. It argues that a proper assessment of effects of family policies needs to take the combined...

This paper argues that theoretical and methodological aspects account for the ambiguous results of investigations into the effects of family policies on fertility. Theoretically we employ approaches of comparative welfare-state research, of the sociology of “constructed categories”, and of...

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...

This article examines current family policies in Western Europe against the backdrop of fertility decline in Europe. Its objective is to depict the nature of family policies from a cross-national perspective in order to illuminate potential relationships between them and demographic patterns....