Parenthood is often considered a major factor behind gender differences in time allocation, especially between paid work and housework. This article investigates the impact of parenthood on men’s and women’s daily time use in Sweden and how it changed over the 1990s. The analysis is made using time diary data from the Multinational Time Use Survey (MTUS; N = 13,729) and multivariate Tobit regressions. The results indicate that while parenthood in 1990 – 1991 clearly strengthened the traditional gender division of labor in the household, this was much less the case in 2000 – 2001, when parenthood affected men and women in a more similar way.

In this article, we explore marital exogamy (especially intermarriage between immigrants and natives) among 39 different immigrant groups using cross-sectional registry data for the total immigrant populations in Sweden in 2003. Immigrants who are better educated, who spend a longer time in Sweden before marriage and live outside the bigger cities are more likely to be married to natives. Controlling for age at immigration, education, time between immigration and marriage, settlement size and the relative size of the immigrant group of the opposite sex, immigrants from Western Europe (excluding Finland) and the United States are more likely to be married to natives than are other immigrants. We also analyse the link between intermarriage and economic integration, with the results indicating a strong association between intermarriage and economic integration in terms of employment and income. Immigrants married to natives are more likely to be employed, and also to have higher individual and household income.

In this article, we analyze fertility control in a rural population characterized by natural fertility, using survival analysis on a longitudinal data set at the individual level combined with food prices. Landless and semilandless families responded strongly to short-term economic stress stemming from changes in prices. The fertility response, both to moderate and large changes in food prices, was the strongest within six months after prices changed in the fall, which means that the response was deliberate. People foresaw bad times and planned their fertility accordingly. The result highlights the importance of deliberate control of the timing of childbirth before the fertility transition, not in order to achieve a certain family size but, as in this case, to reduce the negative impacts of short-term economic stress.

This article analyzes the connection between exogamy and union dissolution using individual level register data for native Swedes and immigrants in Sweden. We study both married and cohabiting unions, from the birth of the first child until dissolution (N = 403,294). Event history models are employed to study the association between type of union and value dissimilarity between spouses on the one hand, and union dissolution, on the other, controlling for human capital and demographic characteristics. The results are in line with the exogamy hypothesis; that mixed unions face higher dissolution risks than endogamous unions. We also find support for the value dissimilarity hypothesis; that the disruptive effect of exogamy increases with the degree of value context dissimilarity between partners. Finally, the results corroborate the gender difference hypothesis; that the effects on union dissolution of exogamy and value context dissimilarity depend on the gender of the immigrant in exogamous unions.