Combining a Two-Sex Model of Births with Decomposition Methods to Explain Changing Fertility Patterns

Christian Dudel , Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research

Changes in fertility over time are driven by many factors. In this paper, a two-sex model of births is combined with decomposition methods to decompose changes in measures of fertility over time into four factors: age structure of the female population in the reproductive age range; age-specific birth rates; age-specific mating patterns; and relative cohort sizes of men and women. For high-income countries these factors will reflect, respectively, population aging, postponement, gender relations, and birth squeezes. Swedish data is used as an example. Sweden is an interesting case, as the average age difference between father and mother at childbirth mostly stayed unchanged since 1968, despite increasing gender equality. The analysis shows that this is due to two factors which almost cancel out: while postponement had a decreasing influence on the parental age difference, matting patterns had an increasing effect, due to younger mothers partnering with increasingly older fathers.

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 Presented in Session 62. New Methodological Approaches in Fertility Research