Increases in union stability and non-union childbearing during the latter half of the 20th century produced substantial increases in the prevalence of step-families. Research on step-family fertility in several European countries and the United States show that, net of a couple’s combined...

When assessing the importance of education for fertility, one should ideally use complete education histories. Unfortunately, such data are often not available. It is illustrated here, using register data for Norwegian women born in 1969, that inclusion of educational level at the latest age...

The purpose of this paper is to provide a comparative overview of recent trends and patterns in childbearing in the three Scandinavian countries: Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. We use indexes produced by applying event-history techniques to register data of the three countries in order to describe...

This paper introduces a collection of related studies on different aspects of research on European fertility and family dynamics. The authors who have contributed to this special Volume presented their papers at a working party at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock,...

This paper analyzes the impact of women’s economic activity, earnings and take-up of child home care allowance on childbearing, using a ten percent sample from a longitudinal register data set that covers the entire female population of reproductive age in Finland in 1988-2000. Results...

One of the most compelling demographic questions in contemporary Europe has been whether immigrant populations will bring their youthful age pyramids to help support Europe’s subfertile, aging populations. But how do immigrants envision their own reproductive life trajectories across...

I examine if and how rural Malawians alter their childbearing as a consequence of concern regarding the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The paper is motivated by the debate which opposes two ideas regarding the childbearing effect of high HIV infection rates and heightened AIDS mortality: one, the...

This paper studies the role of public policy to promote efficiency in human capital accumulation in the representative agent framework. Agents accumulate human capital by spending time in home study and in publicly provided schools. The individual faces an aggregate externality in the...

In many professional labor markets the number of new workers follows a cyclical time path. This phenomenon is usually explained by means of a cobweb model that is based on the assumptions of myopic wage expectations and occupational immobility. Since both assumptions are questioned by the...