Having Kids Later. Economic Analyses for Industrialized Countries

Main trends are presented on fertility, age of the mother at having her first child, and time that young people spend in fulltime education. Fertility is declining and is now well below the population replacement rate in all European countries. To some extent the fertility decline is caused by postponement of motherhood in the sense that the decline would have been smaller if mothers of successive generations were not getting increasingly old. But why are women and men forming families so late, and what role is played by the extension of formal education? Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2005