Spain, a country of emigration during centuries, has become a country of immigration in the last twenty years: the foreign population increased from 0.9% in 1991 to 8.5% in 2005. Since Spain also has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, the potential impact of immigration on the...

Economic and sociological theories of marriage have long emphasized the impact of women’s education and employment on union formation. In this study, we explore the relevance of the female economic independence hypothesis to explain women’s patterns of entry into marriage and...

The 2000 censuses show that the proportion of women below age 30 who are mothers has dropped substantially in most Latin America countries, suggesting that the social imperative of early motherhood, which has long prevailed in the region, is weakening. Surveys conducted in 14 Latin American...

In Spain, nearly two-thirds of women aged 20-34 have not yet entered their first union. However, almost half of them have a stable partner in a different household. Hence, the drop in marriage rates and low prevalence of cohabitation cannot be rightly interpreted as a decline in partnership...

Nonmarital childbearing is becoming an increasingly common path to family formation in Spain. The proportion of births to unmarried mothers has increased from 2% in 1975 to 30.2% in 2007. Along with this marked increase, there has been an important shift in the sociodemographic profile of...

This article proposes an indirect method to validate existing estimates of immigrants? stock from the Spanish municipal population register, which some believe might be over-counting immigrants who double register in different municipalities or fail to deregister when leaving the country. The...

The gap between fertility intentions and behaviour remains a contentious area of theoretical, methodological and policy debate. Previous fertility studies have focused on individual and institutional characteristics, at the expense of the recognition of meso-level family social capital and...

This paper aims to investigate whether friends’ and peers’ behavior influence and individual’s entry into marriage and parenthood during the transition to adulthood of young, U.S. adults. After first studying entry into marriage and parenthood as two independent events, we then examine...

Fertility levels have fallen drastically in most industrialized countries. Diverse theoretical and empirical frameworks have had difficulty in explaining these unprecedented low levels of fertility. More recently, however, attention has turned from classic explanations, such as women’s...