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...

This special collection of Demographic Research is devoted to the issue of how economic and employment uncertainties relate to fertility and family dynamics in Europe. The collection is based on contributions to a workshop held in Berlin in July 2009, which in turn was stimulated by the onset of...

Some 20 years after unification, the contrast between East and West Germany provides a unique natural experiment for studying the persistence of communist-era family patterns, the effects of economic change, and the complexities of the process of fertility postponement. After unification,...

This document describes the standardization process of the Harmonized Histories. The Harmonized Histories is a comparative database of rich reproductive and union histories from surveys conducted in a number of countries in Europe. Given that birth and union data has been collected in a number...

This paper validates the fertility and union histories of the German Generations and Gender Survey (GGS). One major result from this validation is that the fertility of the older GGS-cohorts is too low, while it is too high for the younger cohorts. For partnership histories, we find a similar...

Until 2008, Germany’s vital statistics did not include information on the biological order of each birth. This resulted in a dearth of important demographic indicators, such as the mean age at first birth and the level of childlessness. Researchers have tried to fill this gap by generating...

The birth cohort 1971 entered transition to adulthood at the onset of societal transformation in East Germany. Their marriage and fertility behavior therefore was expected to be severely affected by the upheavals following unification. And indeed, compared to their predecessors, there is a...

Mit dem „Scientific Use File Vollendete Versichertenleben 2004“ stehen der Forschung erstmalig Prozessdaten zur Verfügung, um das Erwerbs- und Ferti-litätsverhalten von Frauen im Zusammenhang zu analysieren. Dieser Beitrag geht der Frage nach, ob dieser Datensatz geeignet ist, um das...

This paper investigates whether economic uncertainty induces a postponement of family formation. We use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel which provides longitudinal information of economic uncertainty and fertility for the period 1984 to 2004. We employ ‘objective’ measures of...