Demographers and others often study the interaction between two types of individual-level behaviour, such as migration and childbearing. Unfortunately, one can get estimation bias if one compares childbearing before and after migration from data confined to migrants, say, as is sometimes done to...

There has been a lot of demographic research concerning the relationship between education and fertility. Most studies, however, focus on the level of education and do not include the field of education. Our paper shows that the field of education serves as a better indicator of a woman’s...

Although cohabitation and childbearing within cohabitation has increased dramatically in Europe over the past decades, the variation across Europe remains remarkable. Most studies on changing union formation have not explicitly addressed how state policies may be facilitating cohabitation or,...

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Hamilton quantified the force of selection on an age-specific mutation. Hamilton’s indicators of the age-specific force of selection always decline with age. This result is of profound importance to the theory of the evolution of senescence. Here I derive alternative indicators within...

Using retrospective union, birth, and education histories that span 1980-2003, this study investigates nonmarital childbearing in post-Soviet Russia. We employ a combination of methods to decompose fertility rates by union status and analyze the processes that lead to a nonmarital birth. We find...

Competing views exist concerning the impact of geographical mobility on childbearing patterns. Early research shows that internal migrants largely exhibit fertility levels dominant in their childhood environment, while later studies find migrants’ fertility to resemble more closely that of...

Procedures that seek to explain current behavior by future outcomes (anticipatory analysis) constitute a widespread but problematic approach in life-course analysis because they disturb the role of time and the temporal order of events. Nevertheless the practice is often used, not least because...

Nearly every European country has experienced some increase in nonmarital childbearing, largely due to increasing births within cohabitation. Relatively few studies in Europe, however, investigate the educational gradient of childbearing within cohabitation or how it changed over time. Using...

This paper examines causality and parameter instability in the long-run relationship between fertility and women’s employment. This is done by a cross-national comparison of macro-level time series data from 1960–2000 for France, West Germany, Italy, Sweden, the UK, and the USA. By applying...