Family life in power couples.: Continued childbearing and union stability among the educational elite in Sweden, 1991–2005

The Nonlinear Linkage Between Earnings Homogamy and Earnings Inequality Among Married Couples

More married couples today consist of two high-earning or two low-earning partners (i.e., earnings homogamy), which leads to greater earnings inequality in married-couple families. Surprisingly few studies have examined this relationship by earnings level, leaving open the question of whether the increase in earnings homogamy at each level of earnings contributes equally to between-couple earnings inequality. I address this question using data on urban China during 1988-2013. Changes in earnings homogamy account for 6% to 11% of the increase in between-couple inequality, but importantly, decomposition reveals that 57% to 68% of the overall impact is driven by the growing earnings homogamy among the top 20% of husbands and their wives. I reach the same finding by replicating the analyses using data from the United States. Two explanations account for this finding: (1) earnings homogamy has increased more among high earners; and (2) all else being equal, increases among high earners are mechanically more influential in shaping the level of between-couple inequality. These findings have important theoretical and policy implications.

Social class and fertility: A long-run analysis of Southern Sweden, 1922-2015

This paper examines social class differences in fertility, using longitudinal micro-level data for a regional sample in Sweden, 1922-2015. Using discrete-time event history models, we estimated the association between social class and parity-specific duration to next birth, adjusting for household income in separate models. Social class was associated with fertility quite independently from income and the association was both parity-dependent and sex-specific. For transitions to parenthood, higher class position was associated with higher fertility for men and lower fertility for women before 1970, but then converged into a positive association for both sexes after 1990. For continued childbearing, a weak U-shaped relationship before 1947 turned into a positive relationship for second births and a negative relationship for higher-order births in the period after 1990. These patterns likely reflect broader changes in work-family compatibility and are connected to profound shifts in labour markets and institutional arrangements in twentieth-century Sweden.

Partners' Educational Characteristics and Fertility: Disentangling the Effects of Earning Potential and Unemployment Risk on Second Births

This study investigates the link between the educational characteristics of partners in heterosexual relationships and their transition to second births, accounting for the selection into parenthood by fitting multi-level event history models. We compare the fertility of Beckerian unions characterized by gender-role specialization with the fertility of dual-earner couples, characterized by the pooling of incomes. Focusing on the economic aspect of the educational degree, in a first step, we estimate the earning potential and unemployment risks by field and level of education, country and sex using European Labour Force Surveys. Next, we link these results with Generation and Gender Survey data from six countries and model couples' transition to second births. We find evidence in support of both the pooling of resources family model (notably in Belgium) and the Beckerian gender-role specialization model. The effects of the earning potential and unemployment risk attached to his and her field of education tends to vary by country context.

Partners' Educational Pairings and Fertility Across Europe

We provide new evidence on the education-fertility relationship by using EU-SILC panel data on 24 European countries to investigate how couples' educational pairings predict their childbearing behavior. We focus on differences in first-, second-, and third-birth rates among couples with varying combinations of partners' education. Our results show important differences in how education relates to parity progressions depending on the education of the partner. First, highly educated homogamous couples show a distinct childbearing behavior in most country clusters. They tend to postpone the first birth most and display the highest second- and third-birth rates. Second, contrary to what may be expected based on the "new home economics" approach, hypergamous couples with a highly educated male and a lower-educated female partner display among the lowest second-birth transitions. Our findings underscore the relevance of interacting both partners' education for a better understanding of the education-fertility relationship.

The Reproductive Ecology of Industrial Societies, Part II : The Association between Wealth and Fertility

Studies of the association between wealth and fertility in industrial populations have a rich history in the evolutionary literature, and they have been used to argue both for and against a behavioral ecological approach to explaining human variability. We consider that there are strong arguments in favor of measuring fertility (and proxies thereof) in industrial populations, not least because of the wide availability of large-scale secondary databases. Such data sources bring challenges as well as advantages, however. The purpose of this article is to illustrate these by examining the association between wealth and reproductive success in the United States, using the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979. We conduct a broad-based exploratory analysis of the relationship between wealth and fertility, employing both cross-sectional and longitudinal approaches, and multiple measures of both wealth (income and net worth) and fertility (lifetime reproductive success and transitions to first, second and third births). We highlight the kinds of decisions that have to be made regarding sample selection, along with the selection and construction of explanatory variables and control measures. Based on our analyses, we find a positive effect of both income and net worth on fertility for men, which is more pronounced for white men and for transitions to first and second births. Income tends to have a negative effect on fertility for women, while net worth is more likely to positively predict fertility. Different reproductive strategies among different groups within the same population highlight the complexity of the reproductive ecology of industrial societies. These results differ in a number of respects from other analyses using the same database. We suggest this reflects the impossibility of producing a definitive analysis, rather than a failure to identify the “correct” analytical strategy. Finally, we discuss how these findings inform us about (mal)adaptive decision-making.

Wealth, fertility and adaptive behaviour in industrial populations

The lack of association between wealth and fertility in contemporary industrialized populations has often been used to question the value of an evolutionary perspective on human behaviour. Here, we first present the history of this debate, and the evolutionary explanations for why wealth and fertility (the number of children) are decoupled in modern industrial settings. We suggest that the nature of the relationship between wealth and fertility remains an open question because of the multi-faceted nature of wealth, and because existing cross-sectional studies are ambiguous with respect to how material wealth and fertility are linked. A literature review of longitudinal studies on wealth and fertility shows that the majority of these report positive effects of wealth, although levels of fertility seem to fall below those that would maximize fitness. We emphasize that reproductive decision-making reflects a complex interplay between individual and societal factors that resists simple evolutionary interpretation, and highlight the role of economic insecurity in fertility decisions. We conclude by discussing whether the wealth-fertility relationship can inform us about the adaptiveness of modern fertility behaviour, and argue against simplistic claims regarding maladaptive behaviour in humans.

The educational gradient in marital disruption: a meta-analysis of European research findings

A large number of empirical studies have investigated the effects of women's education on union dissolution in Europe, but results have varied substantially. This paper seeks to assess the relationship between educational attainment and the incidence of marital disruption by systematizing the existing empirical evidence. A quantitative literature review (a meta-analysis) was conducted to investigate the temporal change in the relationship, net of inter-study differences. The results point to a weakening of the positive educational gradient in marital disruption over time and even to a reversal in the direction of this gradient in some countries. The findings also show that the change in the educational gradient can be linked to an increase in access to divorce. Finally, the results suggest that women's empowerment has played an important role in changing the educational gradient, while the liberalization of divorce laws has not.

Parental status and gender preferences for children: is differential fertility stopping consistent with the trivers-willard hypothesis?

Based on evolutionary reasoning, Trivers & Willard (1973) predicted status-biased sex composition and parental investment with son-preferencing effects in higher, and daughter-preferencing effects in lower status groups. Previous research shows mixed results. This study uses event-history methods and Swedish register data to study one possible mechanism in isolation: do parents in different status groups vary in their proclivities to continue fertility based on the sex composition of previous offspring? The results show no support for the Trivers-Willard hypothesis on a wide range of different status indicators. Future research on the stated hypothesis should focus on physiological rather than behavioural mechanisms.