In this paper, we study the impact of macro- and micro-economic uncertainty on family formation between 1970 and 2000 in The Netherlands. Using data of the Family Survey Dutch Population, we analysed the monthly hazard rates of experiencing the transition into first union, first marriage and parenthood after the start of the relationship of 365 male and 364 female partners by applying piecewise-constant exponential models. The results show that macro-economic uncertainties, i.e. high unemployment rates, lead to postponement of the first union and marriage, but not of the first child. In addition, we found that this relationship is not interpreted by individual-level employment insecurity, i.e. temporary employment or unemployment, which does not seem to prevent people from making long-term family commitments. Although hypothesized, we did not find that the negative effects of macro- and micro-level insecurities on family formation reinforce each other or that they vary between individuals with different educational qualifications.

Age-specific rates of particular disability types are important for planning purposes and are a valuable input to estimates and projections of populations with different disabilities. However, survey estimates of schedules of disability rates display evidence of sampling variability and sub-national disability schedules are often unavailable for reasons of disclosure protection. This paper develops and evaluates a method to smooth sampling variability in national schedules of disability using a technique that has applicability to sub-national estimation of age-specific disability rates. Relational models are used to adjust the limiting long-term illness schedule for England (Census 2001) to represent different disability schedules (Health Survey for England 2000/2001) smoothing sampling fluctuations. For hearing disability a simple Brass relational model involving two parameters provides a good fit. For other disability types a modified version of the Ewbank relational model with three parameters is required. This paper illustrates that relational models can accurately capture the relationship between age-specific rates of limiting long-term illness and various disability types.

This paper investigates the role of family trajectory, i.e., the whole sequence of family events during the life course of early adults in shaping their health outcomes. Union formation and childbearing are jointly considered, since the two life domains are highly connected and their intersections may have an effect on health outcomes. Data come from wave I and wave IV of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) in the United States. The paper is divided in two parts. The first part focuses on family transitions and investigates if changes in timing (when events happen), quantum (what and how many transitions), and ordering (in what order), have an effect on the health of young women. In the second part, life course trajectories are classified into six groups representing different ideal-types of family trajectories and the association of these trajectories with health outcomes is explored. Results suggest that family trajectories play an important role on different health outcomes. Controlling for selection and background characteristics, precocious and “non-normative” transitions are associated with lower self-reported health and higher propensity of smoking and drinking.

This work examines what role children play in the re-partnering process in five European countries (Norway, France, Germany, Romania, and the Russian Federation) by addressing the following research questions: (1) To what extent do men and women differ in their re-partnering chances?; (2) Can gender differences in re-partnering be explained by the presence of children?; (3) How do the custodial arrangements and the child’s age affect the re-partnering chances of men and women? We use the partnership and parenthood histories of the participants in the first wave of the Generations and Gender Survey (United Nations, Generations and Gender Programme: Survey Instruments. United Nations, New York/Geneva, 2005) to examine the transition to moving in with a new partner following the dissolution of the first marital union, separately for men and women. The story that emerges is one of similarities in the effects rather than differences. In most countries, men are more likely to re-partner than women. This gender difference can be attributed to the presence of children as our analyses show that childless men and women do not differ in their probability to re-partner. Mothers with resident children are less likely to re-partner than non-mothers and a similar though often non-significant effect of resident children is observed for fathers. In most countries we find that as the child ages, the chances to enter a new union increase. In sum, our study indicates that children are an important factor in re-partnering and a contributor to the documented gender gap in re-partnering, and this holds throughout distinct institutional and cultural settings.

Does gender equality matter for fertility? Demographic findings on this issue are rather inconclusive. We argue that one reason for this is that the complexity of the concept of gender equality has received insufficient attention. Gender equality needs to be conceptualized in a manner that goes beyond perceiving it as mere “sameness of distribution”. It needs to include notions of gender equity and thus to allow for distinguishing between gender difference and gender inequality. We sketch three dimensions of gender equality related to employment, financial resources, and family work, which incorporate this understanding: (1) the ability to maintain a household; (2) agency and the capability to choose; and (3) gender equity in household and care work. We explore their impact on childbearing intentions of women and men using the European Generations and Gender Surveys. Our results confirm the need for a more nuanced notion of gender equality in studies on the relationship between gender equality on fertility. They show that there is no uniform effect of gender equality on childbearing intentions, but that the impact varies by gender and by parity.

In this study, we assess the accuracy of fertility estimates that stem from the retrospective information that can be derived from an existing cross-sectional population. Swedish population registers contain information on the childbearing of all people ever registered as living in Sweden, and thus allow us to avoid problems of selectivity by the virtue of survival or nonemigration when estimating the fertility measures for previous calendar periods. We calculate two types of fertility rates for each year in 1961–1999: (i) rates that are based on the population that was living in Sweden at the end of 1999, and (ii) rates that also include information on people who had died or emigrated before the turn of the twentieth century. We find that the omission of information on individuals who had emigrated or died, as the situation would be in any demographic survey, most often have negligible effects on fertility measures. However, first-birth rates of immigrants gradually become more biased as we move back in time from 1999 so that they increasingly tend to over-estimate the true fertility of that population.