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Until the late 1980s there was little non-marital cohabitation in Romania. After the fall of state socialism, the overall fraction in consensual unions grew steadily, and by 2005 it had reached some 10%. This development had consequences for the patterns of childbearing. The present paper presents selected features of fertility in consensual and marital unions in Romania over the period 1985-2005 based on the data from the national Generations and Gender Survey conducted in Romania in 2005. To this end we use underlying fertility rates specified by union duration and utilize a metric based on an aggregation of such rates over all durations, irrespective of parity. We also highlight groups of women who have been particularly prone to have children outside marriage, namely women with a low educational attainment and women of a rural origin. Women in consensual unions in these two groups were strongly affected by the dramatic changes in family policies around 1990, and their aggregate fertility in cohabitational unions in subsequent years is similar to that of marital unions. For the fertility of partnered women in the two groups, it does not seem to matter much whether they are married or not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We offer a comparison between the age profiles of rates of formation of marital and non-marital unions among women in Russia, Romania, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Italy. We show that there is considerable variability across these populations in the levels and age patterns of union entry rates, ranging (i) from high and early rates in Russia to slow and late entries in Italy; and (ii) from the emphasis on marriage seen in Russia, Poland, Italy, and particularly Romania, to the dominant role of cohabitation reported for Bulgaria. Although this paper mainly discusses known features (like the patterns for Italy), these features are displayed with an unusual degree of clarity in the comparative framework, which also highlights unusual patterns, such as those seen in Bulgaria. We do not find much commonality in union-entry rates among ex-communist countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 decline when moving across groups with increasing education, and the decline becomes greater if unobserved heterogeneity is added to the analysis. The present paper demonstrates this pattern, and shows that, because this feature is retained in the presence of control variables, such as age at first birth and period effects, the selectivity is not produced by a failure to account for the control variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By European standards, consensual first unions have been rare in Romania, and they remain so even though their incidence has increased by a factor of almost five since the early 1960s. Rates of conversion of consensual unions into marriages have been cut in half over the same four decades or so, and marriage rates have declined by a similar factor since the fall of state socialism, which is more dramatic because this period is so much shorter. There have been strong ethnic differentials in union-entry rates in the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]