We investigate the hypothesis that the propensity of a stepfamily couple to have a shared child is inversely related to the responsibility for rearing pre-union children. We compare effects of coresident pre-union children to those of nonresident, and effects of the woman’s children to those...

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...

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...

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...

This article examines the effect of employment experience on first birth risks in Great Britain. The data used is from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). A positive effect of employment experience on first birth risks is found, in accordance with pre-dictions from economic models of...

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...

In this paper we study the transition to parenthood, analyzing data from three waves of a psychological longitudinal survey from Rostock, eastern Germany. We apply hazard regressions in order to predict the timing of first births of 117 men and 124 women born in 1970 and 1971. Subjects, who were...

The aim of this paper is to compare family policies and fertility patterns in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the German Federal Republic (FRG). Among other aspects, both societies particularly differed in the integration of women into the labor market. By contrasting the...

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