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

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Abstract

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.

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Fig. 1

Source: Own calculations on EU-LFS data 2009–2013

Fig. 2

Source: Own calculations on EU-LFS data 2009–2013

Fig. 3

Source: Own calculations on EU-LFS data 2003–2013

Fig. 4

Source: Own calculations on EU-LFS data 2003–2013

Fig. 5

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Notes

  1. We excluded France because categories of education, health and welfare and services were not included, harming the comparability of results. We also had to exclude Norway because it was not possible to estimate the earning potential by means of the European Labour Force Surveys, given that the income variable for this country was not available.

  2. http://www.uis.unesco.org/Education/Pages/international-standard-classiication-of-education.aspx accessed on the 14 September 2015.

  3. This database is an administrative data collection that is administered jointly by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization Institute for Statistics (UNESCO-UIS), the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Statistical Office of the European Union (EUROSTAT).

  4. Since Eurostat does not provide information on the general/unspecified field of study, we calculated the proportion of women in this category using GGS data themselves, considering all men and women born between 1960 and 1987 with at least upper-secondary degree.

  5. Control variables for the transition to the second birth include duration splines, woman’s age at the first birth and its square, union’s cohorts, respondent’s sex, respondent’s enrolment, union order of the respondent, type of union, age difference between partners.

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Funding

This study was funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013)/ERC Grant Agreement No. 312290 for the GENDERBALL project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut National d’Etudes Démographiques (INED), 133 Bd Davout, 75020, Paris, France

    Alessandra Trimarchi

  2. Centre for Sociological Research, University of Leuven, Parkstraat 45, 3000, Louvain, Belgium

    Jan Van Bavel

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  1. Alessandra Trimarchi
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Correspondence to Alessandra Trimarchi.

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Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 4, 5 and Fig. 6.

Table 4 Sample selection and size of the sample for each birth event.
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Table 5 Categorization of the field of study
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Fig. 6
figure 6

Source: Own calculations on the UNESCO/OECD/Eurostat database on education [educ_grad5] and GGS data

Share of graduated women (ISCED 3–6) by field of study and country.

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Trimarchi, A., Van Bavel, J. Partners’ Educational Characteristics and Fertility: Disentangling the Effects of Earning Potential and Unemployment Risk on Second Births. Eur J Population 36, 439–464 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10680-019-09537-w

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