The present study provides an investigation of patterns in childbearing among foreign‐born women in Sweden from the 1960s to the 1990s. Event‐history techniques are applied to longitudinal population register data on childbearing and migration of 446,000 foreign‐born women who had ever lived in Sweden before the end of 1999. Period trends in parity‐specific fertility appear to be quite similar for Swedish‐ and foreignborn women, but important differences exist in levels of childbearing propensities between women from different countries of origin. Most immigrant groups tend to display higher levels of childbearing shortly after immigration. We conclude that migration and family building in many cases are interrelated processes and that it is always important to account for time since migration when fertility of immigrants is studied.

As global deaths from COVID-19 continue to rise, the world’s governments, institutions, and agencies are still working toward an understanding of who is most at risk of death. In this study, data on all recorded COVID-19 deaths in Sweden up to May 7, 2020 are linked to high-quality and accurate individual-level background data from administrative registers of the total population. By means of individual-level survival analysis we demonstrate that being male, having less individual income, lower education, not being married all independently predict a higher risk of death from COVID-19 and from all other causes of death. Being an immigrant from a low- or middle-income country predicts higher risk of death from COVID-19 but not for all other causes of death. The main message of this work is that the interaction of the virus causing COVID-19 and its social environment exerts an unequal burden on the most disadvantaged members of society.

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Systematic comparisons of fertility developments based on education, gender and country context are rare. Using harmonized register data, we compare cohort total fertility and ultimate childlessness by gender and educational attainment for cohorts born beginning in 1940 in four Nordic countries. Cohort fertility (CTF) initially declined in all four countries, although for cohorts born in the 1950s and later, the CTF remained stable or declined only modestly. Childlessness, which had been increasing, has plateaued in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Women’s negative educational gradient in relation to total fertility has vanished, except in Finland, while men’s positive gradient has persisted. The highest level of men’s childlessness appears among the least educated. In the oldest female cohorts, childlessness was highest among the highly educated, but these patterns have changed over the cohorts as childlessness has increased among the low educated and remained relatively stable among higher educated women. In Denmark, Norway and Sweden, childlessness is now highest among the least educated women. We witness both a new gender similarity and persistent (among men) and new (among women) educational disparities in childbearing outcomes in the Nordic region. Overall, the number of low educated has decreased remarkably over time. These population segments face increasing social and economic disadvantages that are reflected as well in their patterns of family formation. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1007/s10680-018-9492-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

The present study investigates the demographics of same-sex marriages--that is, registered partnerships-in Norway and Sweden. We give an overview of the demographic characteristics of the spouses of these partnerships, study patterns of their divorce risks, and compare the dynamics of same-sex couples with those of heterosexual marriages. We use longitudinal information from the population registers of the two countries that cover all persons in partnerships. Our demographic analyses include information on characteristics such as age, sex, geographic background, experience of previous opposite-sex marriage, parenthood, and educational attainment of the partners involved. The results show that in many respects, the distributions of married populations on these characteristics differ by the sex composition of the couples. Patterns in divorce risks are rather similar in same-sex and opposite-sex marriages, but divorce-risk levels are considerably higher in same-sex marriages. The divorce riskforfemale partnerships is double that for male partnerships.

In this paper, we present a number of descriptive measures on children's experience 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 children are born into and what experience they subsequently have of various family-transformation events of their mothers. Our presentation reveals some similarities but also striking differences in the family-demographic experience of children in different countries. The USA stands out as one extreme case with its very high proportion of children born to a lone mother, with a higher probability of children who experience a union disruption of their parents than anywhere else, and with many children having the experience of living in a stepfamily. Italy stands out at the other end of the scale. Practically all children here are born to a married mother and very few of them experience the dissolution of their parents' union before they turn 15.

BackgroundEconomic uncertainty has become an increasingly important factor in explanations of declining fertility and postponed family formation across Europe. Yet the micro-level evidence on this topic is still limited. ObjectiveThis special collection of Demographic Research focuses on the issue of how economic and employment uncertainties relate to fertility and family dynamics in Europe. MethodsThe collection is comprised of studies that explore how various dimensions of employment uncertainty, such as temporary working contracts and individual and aggregate unemployment, are related to the fertility and family formation of women and men across Europe. The studies cover Germany, the UK, France, Russia, Estonia, Sweden, Italy, Spain, and Israel. ResultsThe various micro-level studies that are assembled in this special collection do not provide a simple answer to the question of whether and how economic uncertainty suppresses (or stimulates) fertility. However, some systematic variation by welfare state regime is discernable. ConclusionsGiven the recent economic volatility in Europe, we expect that labor market uncertainties will remain an important component of explanations of fertility developments in the 21st century.

This paper argues that theoretical and methodological aspects account for the ambiguous results of investigations into the effects of family policies on fertility.Theoretically we employ approaches of comparative welfare-state research, of the sociology of "constructed categories", and of the "new institutionalism" to demonstrate that investigations into the effects of policies on fertility need to contextualize policies and reduce their complexities by focusing on "critical junctures", "space", and "usage". As regards methods we argue that the policy effects can only be assessed properly if we study the impact of policies on individual behavior, event-history models applied to individual-level data being the state-of-theart of such an approach. We present studies on the impact of family policies onSwedish childbearing behavior to demonstrate that an analytical and methodological approach as we advocate prevents us from drawing misleading conclusions about the effects of family policies on childbearing and fertility.2