Background: After the reunification of Germany, mortality among older eastern Germans converged quickly with western German levels. Simultaneously, the pension benefits of eastern Germans rose tenfold. Objective: We make use of German reunification as a natural experiment to show that, first,...

Population aging is an inevitable global demographic process. Most of the literature on the consequences of demographic change focuses on the economic and societal challenges that we will face as people live longer and have fewer children. In this paper, we (a) describe key trends and...

It has been argued recently that a society’s ‘gender system’ influences parents’ sex preferences for children. If this was true, one should expect to find no evidence of such preferences in countries with a high level of gender equality. In this paper we exploit population register data...

This paper analyzes the relationship between children’s day care and fertility in Germany. First, different modes of childcare are discussed with regard to their availability and costs. We then estimate the impact of having access to public day care and care in social networks on first birth...

Extending recent research on parental gender preferences in the Nordic countries, this study uses unique register data from Finland and Sweden (1971-1999) that provide us with the opportunity to compare childbearing dynamics and possible underlying sex preferences among natives and national...

Empirical research investigating gender preferences for children and their implications for fertility decisions in advanced industrial societies is relatively scarce. Recent studies on this matter have presented ambiguous evidence regarding the existence as well as the direction such preferences...

In this paper, a multilevel approach is used to investigate whether and how regional social contexts influence first and second birth probabilities of women living in western Germany during the 1980s and 1990s. In the theoretical part it is argued that regional opportunity structures as well as...

This article investigates the role of women´s residential district in the process of family formation in western Germany during the 1980s and 1990s. Our analysis of the transition to first marriage and motherhood is based on the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), which we merge with a rich...

We link population register data to information on regional child care characteristics in order to estimate the influence of the latter on second and third birth intensities of Swedish couples in 1997-98. Our analysis allows us to distinguish interactions and specific effects of different...

There is a vast empirical literature investigating the effects of childcare costs on female employment. Day-care costs are usually treated as a reduction in female wages and are supposed to reduce a woman’s propensity to participate in the labor market. In this paper we argue that an analysis...