A fundamental reversal of the traditional fertility-development relationship has occurred in highly developed countries so that further socioeconomic development is no longer associated with decreasing fertility, but with increasing fertility. In this paper, we seek to shed light on the...

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...

There is a growing body of literature that looks at the causes of below-replacement fertility in developed countries. While the variation in childbearing patterns across countries and between socio-economic groups within a country has been studied in detail, little is known about the differences...

Inter-individual diversity of women according to birth numbers (quantum) and birth spacing (tempo) are important for understanding of fertility regimes. Elsewhere, we have shown that diversity with respect to fertility quantum is increasing from older to younger cohorts. The present study looks...

Previous research has proposed four competing views on an individual’s fertility following a move from one social context to another. Each view has received support but has also been challenged by literature. This study contributes to the existing discussion on fertility by providing an...

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...

We investigate the timing of fertility and marriage as it depends on educational attainment utilizing a birth-month experiment in Sweden that leads to exogenous variation in the age at completing schooling. Our analysis finds that the difference of 11 months in the age at school-leaving between...

This study examines fertility variation across different residential contexts in four Northern European countries: Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. We move beyond the conventional urban-rural focus of most previous studies of within-nation variations in fertility by distinguishing between...

In this paper we discuss trends in the limits to late childbearing, their determinants and potential implications from an empirical long-term perspective. Although the high levels observed in non-contracepting populations have not been reached, fertility in Europe at ages 40+ and 45+ has...

Fertility rates are known to be higher in city suburbs. One interpretation is that the suburban ‘context’ influences the behaviour of individuals who reside there while an alternative is that the ‘composition’ of the suburban population explains the higher fertility levels. Furthermore,...