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The standardized 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 until 1991-92, after which the tempo of childbearing suddenly increased in response to a change in the parental-leave policy. This new policy inadvertently favoured women who had their second or subsequent child shortly after their previous one. We cannot find any indication that the general decline in third births can be seen as a consequence of women's increasing independence from their husbands at the stage in life we study. Furthermore, it still seems to be more difficult to combine motherhood and labour-force participation in Austria than in Sweden, which is a leader in reducing this incompatibility. These developments reflect the tension between advancing gender equality and the dominance of traditional norms in Austria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We focus on the fertility of Swedish men and women who lived in a consensual or marital union in the 1970s and 1980s, and where at least one of the partners had children before they entered that union. Couples without any children before the current union were included for contrast. We find clear evidence that couples wanted a shared biological child, essentially regardless of how many children (if any) they had before their current union. The shared child seems to have served to demonstrate commitment to the union, as did its conversion into a formal marriage. We have not found much support for the hypothesis that our respondents sought to enter parenthood to attain adult status. A second birth might have been valued because it provided a sibling for the first child -- a half-sibling acting as a substitute for a full sibling -- but our evidence for such effects is contradictory. Our analysis makes it very clear that parity progression depends on whose parity we consider. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1980, Sweden made a 'speed premium' on childbearing statutory by letting parents retain the parental leave benefits paid after the birth of one child until after the next birth if it arrived within two years; in 1986 this eligibility interval was extended to thirty months. For longer birth intervals, benefit rights must be re-established by earning a work-related income. During a period of a general rise in fertility in Sweden, parents reacted by increasing their fertility particularly strongly before the end of the eligibility interval. This paper displays these developments. It is a rare demonstration of a direct causal effect of a policy reform on demographic behavior. The general development of fertility levels at the various birth orders has some independent interest and is presented as a background. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On January 1, 1990, new regulations were introduced for the Swedish National Widow's Pension Scheme. The transitional provisions of the reform made it advantageous for many people to marry before the end of 1989 rather than later. The result was an abnormally large number of weddings in December 1989. his highlights the lack of firm norms that govern whether Swedish couples choose to marry or to live in consensual union. It also raises questions concerning how economic rationality works in practice. The philosophy behind the revision of the National Widow's Pension Scheme is that healthy adults of working age in present-day Sweden are expected to support themselves by their own labor and not be provided for by someone else. One assumes that when they reach retirement they will receive a personal old-age pension generated through their own previous earnings. As the new regulations apply to surviving men and women alike, potential widowers have gained improved equality in this area. To potential widows, however, this improvement in gender equality must appear to have been gained at the cost of a deterioration of their own rights. The reason why so many people married before the end of 1989 was the transitional provisions, intended specifically to protect older and middle-aged women when the new regulations came into force.

Many investigators have found that divorce risks decrease as you move from groups with little educational or social capital to groups with more. This negative educational gradient fits with the notion that people with more education are better at selecting spouses and better at making a marriage work. Other investigators have found a positive gradient, often in populations where the situation is dominated by the individual's ability to handle the divorce process and to cope with the economic and other problems that follow in the wake of a divorce. The sign of the educational gradient in divorce risks seems to depend on the balance between countervailing influences. Information about the gradient over a few educational levels is about as much as you can expect to get from the interview data of a normal-sized general survey. With access to the data from a full-coverage system of the population and educational registers of a sizeable population like that of Sweden, educational effects can be studied in much greater detail. We begin to tap this source in the present paper. When we do, the educational gradient in divorce risks turns out to be too slippery a basis for the general theories that have been developed around it so far, at least in a population where it is reasonably easy to get a divorce and where the hurtful consequences to the divorcees are more limited than elsewhere. There has been no uniform relation between educational level and divorce risk of Swedish women at the various educational levels during the 1970s and 1980s; developments in recent decades in Swedish first-marriage divorce risks have been much more favourable to the more highly educated than to women with less education, and the result is that the educational gradient has become negative as we leave the 1980s. The educational gradient changed sign correspondingly between cohorts born in the mid-1940s and cohorts from the mid-1960s. In a society such... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents partial results from a study of the relation between trends in women's labour-force participation and second and third births in which other individual-level factors are taken into consideration the woman's education, her social background, and her previous demographic behavior. Although men and women entered their first conjugal union at steadily younger ages, they delayed their first births considerably, so that by 1981 only half of all 26-year-old Swedish women had begun childbearing, compared with about two-thirds 10-15 years earlier. This does not necessarily mean, however, that a higher proportion will remain childless. Most women continued to want children, and the majority of them wanted two children and achieved that aim. Only a small proportion felt satisfied with one child, and there were very few young women who had not yet borne children who expected to remain childless by the end of their reproductive period. A large part of the decline in fertility in Sweden was caused by the sharp drop in the number of third births after the middle 1960s, and it is generally believed that increases in the numbers of third births have contributed much to the recent moderate recovery in Swedish fertility.