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Economic Uncertainty and Fertility

Ökonomische Unsicherheit und Fertilität

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Abstract

Sociologists and demographers have long been interested in the role of economic uncertainty in family behavior. Despite the prevailing “bourgeois conviction” that economic uncertainty discourages people from having children, the empirical evidence on this issue is mixed. In this paper, I summarize the recent empirical evidence, and discuss the potential limitations of previous investigations. Among the possible shortcomings of these studies is that many relied exclusively on unemployment as an operational definition of labor market uncertainty. Subjective indicators of economic uncertainty, which measure the individual’s perception of his or her economic situation more directly, often were not available to researchers. Moreover, few of these studies explored group-specific differences in behavior. In this paper, we seek to overcome some of the limitations of these earlier analyses. Based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), we study the role of perceived economic uncertainty in transitions to first and higher order births for the period 1990–2013. In addition, we examine how different population subgroups (stratified by education, parity, and age) respond to economic uncertainty.

Zusammenfassung

Der Zusammenhang von ökonomischer Unsicherheit und Geburtenentwicklung ist ein Themenfeld, das gleichermaßen von soziologischer wie auch von demografischer Bedeutung ist. Obwohl theoretische Überlegungen zumeist der „bürgerlichen Überzeugung“ verhaftet geblieben sind, dass ökonomische Unsicherheiten sich negativ auf das Geburtenverhalten niederschlagen sollten, haben empirische Studien in diesem Bereich eher uneinheitliche Befunde geliefert. Dieser Beitrag fasst aktuelle Studien zusammen und setzt sich kritisch mit den vorliegenden empirischen Befunden auseinander. Zum einen haben bisherige Studien zumeist nur Arbeitslosigkeit als Merkmal ökonomischer Sicherheit herangezogen. Subjektive Indikatoren, die unmittelbarer die aktuelle ökonomische Situation widerspiegeln, waren in den bisher verwendeten Daten oft nicht verfügbar. Darüber hinaus haben nur wenige Studien sich der Frage gewidmet, ob unterschiedliche Subpopulationen unterschiedlich auf ökonomische Unsicherheit reagieren. Mit diesem Beitrag soll ein Teil dieser Forschungslücke geschlossen werden, indem auf Basis der Daten des Sozio-oekonomischen Panels (SOEP) der Jahre 1990–2013 der Einfluss der wahrgenommenen ökonomischen Unsicherheit auf die Geburtenentwicklung untersucht wird. Darüber hinaus wird die Frage in den Mittelpunkt gerückt, ob gruppenspezifische Unterschiede im Verhalten existieren und verschiedene Bevölkerungsgruppen (differenziert nach Bildung, Parität und Alter) anders auf ökonomische Unsicherheiten reagieren.

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Notes

  1. Economic worries are operationalized by the following question: “Wie ist es mit den folgenden Gebieten – machen Sie sich da Sorgen? Um ihre eigene wirtschaftliche Situation“ Response categories are: „Große Sorgen“, „einige Sorgen“, „keine Sorgen.“ In an earlier study, I also employed the fear of losing one’s job as a measure of subjective economic uncertainty (Kreyenfeld 2010). Since this paper already includes an array of models, I decided to restrict the analysis to personal economic worries. An advantage of this variable is that it applies to all respondents, whereas the fear of losing one’s job is only relevant for the employed population.

  2. The analysis that focuses on the partner’s characteristics is restricted to respondents with male partners. Thus, same-sex unions are omitted from that part of the investigation.

  3. In some cases, the month of birth was missing. Here, we imputed this information. Sensitivity analyses in which we dropped the imputed cases from the analysis did not provide results which were much different from the results presented here.

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Acknowledgments

For his many valuable comments and criticisms, I would like to thank Gunnar Andersson (Stockholm University). I am indebted to Miriam Hills for language editing. Any remaining errors are, of course, my own.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Max-Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Konrad-Zuse-Str. 1, 18057, Rostock, Germany

    Michaela Kreyenfeld

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  1. Michaela Kreyenfeld
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Correspondence to Michaela Kreyenfeld.

Appendix

Appendix

Table 5a Occurrences (Occ) and time of exposures (Exp), all episodes
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Table 5b Occurrences (Occ) and time of exposures (Exp), co-residential episodes
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Table 6 Results from Cox-model, relative risks, transition to first birth (baseline hazard: age of woman), second and third birth (baseline hazard: duration since last birth), episodes in co-residential partnership. (Source: GSOEP 1990–2013)
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Kreyenfeld, M. Economic Uncertainty and Fertility. Köln Z Soziol 67 (Suppl 1), 59–80 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11577-015-0325-6

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