Family-policy regimes unfavourable to combining employment with motherhood have been claimed to increase socio-economic differentials in fertility as combining employment and motherhood has become more normative. This claim has to date been explored mainly in reference to 'liberal' AngloAmerican regimes. Comparing education differentials in age at first birth among native-born women of 1950s and 1960s birth cohorts in seven countries representing three regime types, we find persistence in early first births among low-educated women not only in Britain and the United States but also in Greece, Italy, and Spain. Shifts towards later first births, however, were more extreme in Southern Europe and involved to some extent women at all education levels. The educationallyheterogeneous changes in age patterns of first births seen in the Southern European and AngloAmerican family-policy regimes contrast with educationally-homogeneous changes across birth cohorts seen in the study's two 'universalistic' countries, Norway and France.
Research on the counter-or pro-cyclical nature of aggregate fertility over economic cycles has been inconclusive, as results vary significantly across regions and over time. This work examines the variations in Greek birth rates, and confirms that fertility rates in Greece have declined since 2010. Partly as a response to economic uncertainty, childbearing decisions have been revised downward, although not uniformly across population groups. According to our analysis, almost 40,000 fewer babies were born in Greece between 2010 and 2015 than would have been born if pre-recession fertility rates had remained unchanged. Those missing births are mainly attributed to women under age 30, as well as to non-employed women of all ages. In terms of birth order, most of the missing births are second-or higher-order births. Even if a catch-up process occurs in the years to come, the foregone births are already visible as a cavity on the population pyramid.
BACKGROUND Within the context of increasing migration flows and persisting low fertility rates in more developed areas, focus has been placed on the impact of migration on the fertility of receiving countries. OBJECTIVE The paper examines the effect of migration on the fertility of selected European countries, the United States, and Australia for the 2009-2015 period. METHODS We provide methodological insights and evidence derived from comparisons of estimates of age-specific fertility rates (ASFRs) and total fertility rates (TFRs) of native-born or foreign-born women, or female citizens or noncitizens. RESULTS The results show that although the United States and Australia are seen as model countries of migration, the contribution of migrants to the levels and trends in the TFR and in the total number of births in these countries seems to be less significant than in some European countries. Our results also show that differences in the overall TFRs of the United States and selected European countries are driven more by the differences in the TFRs of native-born women than by the net effect of migration. CONCLUSIONS Our study suggests that the impact of migration on fertility is a multifaceted issue, going far beyond the commonly used net effect of migration on increases in a country's TFR.
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