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Individuals' fertility decisions are shaped not only by their own characteristics and life course paths but also by social interaction with others. However, in practice, it is difficult to disentangle the role of social interaction from other factors, such as individual and family background variables. We measure social interaction through the cross-sibling influences on fertility. Continuous-time hazard models are estimated separately for women's first and second births. In addition to individual socioeconomic variables, demographic variables, and an unobserved factor specific to each sibling pair, siblings' birth events and their timing enter as time-varying covariates. We use data from longitudinal population-wide Norwegian administrative registers. The data cover more than 110,000 sibling pairs and include the siblings' fertility, education, income, and marital histories. Our results indicate that cross-sibling influences are relatively strong for the respondents' first births but weak for the second parity transition.

Using Norwegian survey data (n = 4116), we study couples" likelihood of pooling their economic resources. The proportion of cohabitation compared to marriages is high in Norway. Over the last decades, tax policy and the social security system have moved towards equating cohabitation with marriage. Our knowledge of the economic organization of the two types of couples is, however, rather imperfect. Our main hypothesis is that cohabitants are less likely to pool their economic resources than married couples, but that this difference is less if they hold plans to marry. We take into account important factors that largely have been ignored in many earlier studies, namely the presence of children and the duration of the relationship. The results confirm our hypothesis but also show that the difference between cohabitants and married couples is reduced once these important factors are controlled for.Implications for policy are discussed.(145 words)

According to both economic and sociological theory, a couple's divorce rate may be influenced by their own educational attainment, that of their parents, and whether they have taken further education after marriage, although predictions are ambiguous. However, these three variables have never been included simultaneously and few studies have included both partners' characteristics. A discrete-time hazard model based on register and census data on 54178 Norwegian first marriages started 1980-1999 reveals a very strong negative educational gradient in divorce risk and no particularly harmful influence of heterogamy. Parent's education exerts a small positive effect, however. Among couples with the same current level of education, those who have taken education after entry into marriage display the highest divorce rate.

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