At the beginning of the transition period, many Russian households faced substantial economic hardships and uncertainties. An economic downturn had become one of the major factors respon-sible for the significant and rapid decline of Russian fertility. However, many households tried to cope with...

The paper provides an analysis of divorce risk in first marital unions in Russia, with a major focus on the impact of premarital conception on the stability of subsequent marriage. A number of other predictors are also discussed, including age at first marriage, parity and age of the youngest...

Using data from the first round of the national Gender and Generations Surveys of Russia, Romania, and Bulgaria, and from a similar survey for Hungary, we study rates of entry into marital and non-marital unions and display manifestations of the Second Demographic Transition in these data. The...

Period fertility rates fell to previously unseen low levels in a large number of countries beginning in the early 1990s. The persistence of Total Fertility Rates under 1.3 raised the possibility of dramatic, rapid population aging as well as population decline. In an analysis of recent trends,...

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Interpersonal relationships of support have been found to be an important factor in individual fertility intentions in Central and Eastern European countries. The foundations of this positive influence have not been well explored to date, however. We present a theoretical discussion on...

Models on the impact of social networks on reproductive behavior primarily address processes of interpersonal influence on fertility related values and utility perceptions and consider aspects of social support and social capital only to a small extend. On the basis of an exchange theoretical...

By European standards, consensual first unions have been rare in Romania, and they remain so even though their incidence has increased by a factor of almost five since the early 1960s. Rates of conversion of consensual unions into marriages have been cut in half over the same four decades or so,...

Research about fertility has focused in the main on studying separately the influences of communication networks and social capital on reproductive behavior, but it has rarely tried to integrate both network properties theoretically or analytically. We therefore discuss a general model of...

Personal networks receive increasing recognition as structural determinants of fertility. However, the network perspective also helps to explain personal motivations for having children. Using theories of interpersonal exchange and of the value of children, it is argued that children can...