In this paper, we present a number of descriptive measures on children’s experiences of family disruption and family formation. We use data from the Fertility and Family Surveys of 15 European countries and corresponding data from the USA in order to find out what kind of family circumstances...

This paper investigates the role of female earnings in childbearing decisions in two very different European contexts. By applying event history techniques to German and Danish register data during 1981-2001, we demonstrate how female earnings relate to first, second and third birth rates. Our...

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 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...

This is the second of two companion papers addressing the association between educational attainment and fertility for some sixty educational groups of Swedish women, defined according to field of education as well as level of education. The first paper is about childlessness and education, the...

This article studies childbearing dynamics by labor-market status of co-residing parents in Sweden. We apply event-history techniques to longitudinal register data on the life histories of foreign-born mothers from ten different countries and the partners to these women, as well as to a sample...

Extending recent research on parental gender preferences in the Nordic countries, this study uses unique register data from Finland and Sweden (1971-1999) that provide us with the opportunity to compare childbearing dynamics and possible underlying sex preferences among natives and national...

In this paper we extend the concept of educational attainment to cover the field of education taken in addition to the conventional level of education attained. Our empirical investigation uses register records containing childbearing and educational histories of an entire cohort of women born...

In Sweden, parents receive a parental-leave allowance of a high percentage (currently 80%) of their pre-birth salary for about a year in connection with any birth. If they space their births sufficiently closely, they avoid a reduction in the allowance caused by any reduced income earned between...

In this paper, we extend the concept of educational attainment to cover the field of education attained in addition to the conventional level of education. Our empirical investigation uses register records containing childbearing and educational histories of an entire cohort of women born in...