Popular theory wants to explain much of the fertility decline of the 1960s and the 1970s as a consequence of the growth in paid employment among women during the same period. The negative relationship generally found between family size and women's labour-force participation on the individual level is often given a similar interpretation Our tindings in this paper suggest that such notions are too simple In an analysis ot data from the Swedish fertility survey of 1981, there is a reduction in labour-force participation connected with childbearing, but we are unable to discern any appreciable converse influence of the individual employment history on childbearing patterns, represented here by the progression to the third hirth. We also find the opposite of what economic theory has predicted concerning the impact of education on childbearing more highly educated Swedish mothers of two children progress to a third birth more readily than corresponding women with less education The one-sided influence from childbearing to reduced employment should be sufficient to explain the negative relationship mennoned, and it seems that an understanding of the causes of the fertility decline must be found elsewhere than in a theory of labour-specific or education-based human-capatal accumulation on the individual level We offer as a hypothesis the possibility that presentday general fertility trends in affluent populations may be governed more by ideational developments that flow through societies as a whole than by an accumulation of effects of matenahsttc computations mude independently by individual couples.Britta Hoem, Statistics Sweden, S-11581 Stockholm, Sweden.
On the background of the dramatic swings in the Swedish TFR since the mid-1980s we present a first attempt at assessing the impact of labor-market trends on the timing of the first birth based on individual-level register data covering all Swedish women born in 1950 or later.Among our covariates we have each woman's income, partitioned into any income earned from work, any unemployment benefits, and any public support for educational activities. We also have employment trends in her home municipality. The latter variables are included for every relevant year. We find that first-birth rates rose and fell in step with municipal employment levels. The effect is especially strong for young women, and the decline in first birth during the 1990s was concentrated primarily among women aged below 30. First-birth rates increased with a woman's earned income. Unemployed women did not have particularly low first-birth rates, but students did.
Abstract. This paper throws some light on changing family-building patterns in Sweden during the 1960s and 1970s. The family-building events analyzed are first informal cohabitation, first marriage, birth of first child (both outside a union and within a consensual union), and separations from childless informal cohabitation. Results from three previous studies are first summarized. These analyze the patterns by socio-economic and regional origin, applying multiple-decrement techniques separately for each background factor. The new results presented here are based on analyses that use multiplicative hazard models, permitting isolation of the effects of socio-economic background and region of childhood and adolescence respectively. It is generally found that socio-economic background is more important than the region where the woman grew up. Marriage intensities, however, which exhibit a clear regional pattern, are exceptions to this.
In hazard regressions for a number of countries, including Sweden, more highly educated women have been found to have higher third-birth rates than other women. In this paper we show that this positive educational gradient disappears when age at second birth is respecified in order to better catch what age at second birth means to women at the various levels of education. Instead o f a conventional age grouping that is the same for all educational categories, we suggest that the age factor should be defined so as to reflect what is normal and unusual childbearing behavior for each educational level separately. Considerations of a similar nature can be equally important in other contexts.
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