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 investigates the role of men’s and women’s labor-market attachment in the process of family building in Sweden, taking the perspective of couples. Using register data for the years 1981 to 1999 we estimate event-history models for second and third births. It is shown that income...

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...

In diesem Beitrag wird der Zusammenhang zwischen Merkmalen des räumlichen Kontexts und dem Übergang zur ersten Ehe bei westdeutschen Männern in den 1980er und 1990er Jahren untersucht. Hierzu werden im empirischen Teil unter Verwendung von Individualdaten des Sozio-oekonomischen Panels (SOEP)...

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...

Eine zentrale Rolle in der aktuellen Diskussion um eine bessere Vereinbarkeit von Familie und Beruf spielt die Versorgung mit bedarfsgerechter Kinderbetreuung. Eine umfassendes Angebot an Betreuungsplätzen fördert jedoch nicht nur die Müttererwerbstätigkeit, sondern könnte sich auch positiv...

Der Artikel untersucht die Bedeutung regionaler Einflussfaktoren auf der Kreisebene für den Prozess der Familiengründung westdeutscher Frauen in den 1980er und 1990er Jahren. Als theoretischer Rahmen wird ein Mehrebenenmodell soziologischer Erklärung vorgeschlagen. Die empirische Analyse des...