Understanding how having children influences the parents' subjective well-being (happiness) has great potential to explain fertility behavior. We study parental happiness trajectories before and after the birth of a child using large British and German longitudinal data sets. We account for...

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...

Understanding how the process of childbearing influences parental well-being has great potential to explain variation in fertility. However, most research on fertility and happiness uses cross-sectional data, hindering causal conclusions. We study trajectories of parental happiness before and...

There are already several documented examples of recent increases in cohort fertility in Scandinavia, but for most countries, cohorts are too young to see if cohort fertility has increased. We produce new estimates of completed cohort fertility for cohorts born in the 1970s. We combine the best...

During the 1920s and early 1930s, fertility in American municipalities declined overall and with large variation between areas and across time. Using data for 1923-1932 on fertility and public spending for over 50 large cities, we show that the local government programs of health education and...