This special collection of Demographic Research is devoted to the issue of how economic and employment uncertainties relate to fertility and family dynamics in Europe. The collection is based on contributions to a workshop held in Berlin in July 2009, which in turn was stimulated by the onset of...

Increasing proportions of couples are making childbearing decisions in stepfamilies but there has been no general comparative picture across European countries on stepfamily formation. The present paper aims to fill this gap and provides a comparison of European countries using macro-level...

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...

This paper deals with psychological determinants of fertility differentials in East Germany in the 1990s. We test the explanatory and statistical power of psychological covariates in an event-history model of first-birth intensities together with other covariates. We show that different...

There is a growing body of literature that looks at the causes of below-replacement fertility in developed countries. While the variation in childbearing patterns across countries and between socio-economic groups within a country has been studied in detail, little is known about the differences...

In this paper, we investigate the reproductive behavior of young women and men in Kyrgyzstan, with special emphasis on the demographic adjustment strategies of internal migrants in this post-Soviet Central Asian republic. We employ event-history techniques to data from the “Marriage,...

In Sweden, parents receive a parental-leave allowance of a high percentage of their pre-birth salary for about a year in connection with any birth. (The percentage has changed over time, as has the period for which it is paid. For a birth that appears in 2005, parents get 80% of the salary for...

In this paper, we assess the accuracy of fertility estimates that are based on the retrospective information that can be derived from an existing cross-sectional population. Swedish population registers contain the information on childbearing of all people ever living in Sweden and thus allow us...

In this study, we examine the effect of children on divorce risks in first and subsequent marriages in Sweden and compare risk patterns in the two types of marriages based on register data. We examine the impact of parity and the age of the youngest child while standardizing for age at marriage,...

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...