The standardised rate of third births declined by over 50 percent in Austria between the late 1970s and the mid-1990s. The third birth was also postponed gradually over the years up through 1991-92, after which the tempo of childbearing suddenly increased in response to a change in the...

Until the late 1980s there was little non-marital cohabitation in Romania; time in consensual unions constituted only a few per cent of the total time spent in unions every year. After the fall of state socialism, the overall fraction in consensual unions grew steadily, and by 2005 it had reached...

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...

Several countries in Northern and Western Europe report cohort fertility rates of close to two children per woman, including Belgium, France, and Denmark. By contrast, most Central and Southern European countries have cohort fertility levels of only around 1.5-1.6 children. Germany is part of...

This paper uses recently available data from linked pension and employment registers for Germany, which contain complete fertility histories of women as well as longitudinal information of firm-specific characteristics where these women have been employed. It is examined how occupational sex...

In 2007, Germany enacted a radical new parental leave benefit scheme that grants parents 67 percent of their previous income, and includes two “daddy months.” In this paper, we use data from the German Microcensus for the period 1999 to 2009 to explore how this reform has changed fathers’...

Studies that have investigated the role of unemployment in childbearing decisions have often provided conflicting results. We argue that many of the inconsistencies of prior research may be attributed to a neglect of group-specific differences in behavior. In this study, we examine how the...

This paper examines the reliability of biographical information gathered retrospectively. It draws on data from the German Family Panel (pairfam), which collected information on the partnership status at first birth using two different methods. The first method is based on data on partnership...