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In studies of the fertility of migrants in which the data are confined to the migrants only, estimation bias will normally appear in comparisons of childbearing before and after migration. The same issue arises in studies of union formation before and after first birth, marriage formation before and after home purchase, and in any other comparison of behaviour before and after an index event if one confines the study only to those who have experienced the index event. It is normally better to avoid analysis of behaviour before the index event because such analysis actually conditions on the later arrival of the index event. In this paper, we provide graphical and mathematical representations of this problem and show how one can get a meaningful (unconditional) comparison of behaviour before and after the index event provided the data contain enough information for both sub-periods. Otherwise, the analyst should refrain from making a comparison of this nature. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE Remarkably little is known about the significance of consensual unions for fertility. This is true everywhere, but the lacuna is more important in the Nordic countries where there is so much childbearing outside of marriage, mostly in consensual unions. The purpose of this paper is to help fill this hole in our knowledge for Finland. DATA Unusually good register data enable us to study recent fertility trends by union status (married, cohabiting, neither) using records for some 112,000 Finnish women, or 11% of all women at fertile ages. METHODS Our description of fertility is based on group-specific duration-based TFRs, which is the number of children borne by a woman who remains in the group throughout her reproductive life, as computed from the fertility rates for a synthetic cohort. This is an intuitively appealing metric that has been taken into systematic use only recently. RESULTS We find substantial fertility differences between women who cohabit, women who marry directly (i.e., without pre-marital cohabitation), and women who marry their cohabitational partner. As one would also expect in Finland, cohabiting women have much lower fertility than married women. The marital TFR is highest among the directly-married and declines monotonically as the length of pre-marital cohabitation increases, even when premarital childbearing is included in the count. As far as we know the latter relationship has not been shown before, because extensive data for complete cohabitational unions have not been available for other populations. CONCLUSIONS The Finnish data are unique, even among the Nordic countries, in that they contain individual-level life histories of family dynamics that cover consensual unions from their very start. Fertility analysis would benefit if data similar to the Finnish were to become available, because analyses that rely on civil status as an indicator of union status barely add anything to what we already know about today"s family dynamics. [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]

The article focuses on childbearing trends and policies in Europe, particularly in Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries, in the second half of the 20th century. The authors assert that family formation, childbearing behavior, and fertility were influenced by political, economic, and social changes in Europe. The article provides an overview of fertility trends, changes in family size, and the impact of contraception on childbearing behavior in Europe and CCE countries from the 1950s to the early 21st century. The article also discusses the impact of the Second Demographic Transition (SDT) in the 1960s and the effects of migration and social policies on childbearing.

This chapter outlines the positions in the current debate about the possibility of using public policies to influence fertility. We note the polarization between, on the one hand, those who view public policies as obvious means for lifting the currently low fertility levels in Europe, in line with the role of economic policies in a modern society; and, on the other hand, those who feel that family policies are inefficient, and perhaps even unnecessary. We place the contributions of the national chapters of this book in this framework and describe the formidable methodological difficulties that face those who seek to investigate policy impacts on fertility behavior. While properly conducted empirical investigations have overcome such problems and have clearly demonstrated policy effects in specific circumstances, we conclude that, in general, national fertility is possibly best seen as a systemic outcome that depends more on broader attributes, such as the degree of family-friendliness of a society, and less on the presence and detailed construction of monetary benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In studies of differences in fertility between migrants and non-migrants, marriage interferes because migration can be motivated by an impending marriage or can entail entry into a marriage market with new opportunities. One would therefore expect elevated fertility after migration, although a competing theory states that on the contrary fertility ought to be reduced in the time around the move because migration temporarily disturbs the life of the migrant. In any case marriage appears as a process that is intermediary between migration and childbearing. To handle such issues it pays to have a technique that allows the analyst to separate any disruptive effects of migration from any boosting effects of marriage in studies of childbearing. The purposes of the present paper are (i) to remind us that such a technique is available, in fact is straightforward, and (ii) to apply the technique to further analyze a set of data on migration and first-time parenthood in Kyrgyzstan recently used by the second author and Gunnar Andersson. The technique has the neat feature that it allows us to operate with several "clocks" at the same time. In the analysis of first births we keep track of time since migration (for migrants) and time since marriage formation (for the married) beside the respondent's age (for women at childbearing ages); in other connections there may be more clocks. For such analyses we make use of a flexible graphical housekeeping device that allows the analyst to keep track of a feature like whether migration occurs before or after marriage, or at the same time. This is a half-century-old flow chart of statuses and transitions and is not much more complex than the famous Lexis diagram, which originated with Gustav Zeuner, as we now know. These reflexions were first presented at a symposium dedicated to Professor Zeuner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Demographers conventionally estimate the mean number of children ever born to a woman who reaches a given age by adding age-specific fertility rates for her cohort up to that age. If the age selected is at the end of the childbearing period, the result is the cohort's total fertility rate (TFR); if only female babies are counted, the result is the gross reproduction rate (GRR). If births were generated by an age-dependent Poisson process, cumulative fertility rates give appropriate estimates, and so would the Nelson-Aalen estimator based on age-specific counts. Both of these methods are appropriate for that situation, but they estimate empirical mean numbers of births well, even though births are not generated by Poisson processes. This article shows why and when statistics like TFR and GRR are good estimates of mean counts, and how the same reasoning generalizes to the estimation of the mean number of any kind of event in any open population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents some main results of an investigation by life table methods of birth interval data in cohabitational unions (marriages as well as consensual unions) in current Danish cohorts. Our results confirm previous findings that an early age at the start of recorded exposure to childbearing risk is indicative of a rapid pace and high level of subsequent fertility. The analysis modifies previous results and adds several new details regarding cohort trends and the effect of parity at the start of reported cohabitation. For each parity within a period of cohabitation, fertility differentials by reported starting age seem to have diminished from our older cohorts (of age up to 49 years in 1975) to our younger ones (of age less than 30 years in 1975). There are indications of a dramatic change in childbearing behaviour following the arrival of novel attitudes to non-marital cohabitation and childbearing in Denmark about 1967. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]