Risk and Fertility: A Reply to Robinson

Japanese household structure has changed dramatically over the last two decades, especially with regard to multi-generational co-residence. In this paper, we use logit analysis to investigate the extent to which married Japanese men and women aged 30 to 59 live with their parents and, in particular, how socio-economic and demographic characteristics are associated with co-residence. For men, being the eldest child, being in a lower-status occupation, living in a small town or rural area, being in an arranged marriage, and having a parent without a spouse are all positively associated with co-residence. For women, only demographic variables matter – being the eldest child, having a husband who is not the eldest child, and having a parent without a spouse, lead to a higher probability of co-residence with own parents. For those middle-aged Japanese who are not co-residing with their parents, we analyse the frequency of seeing and telephoning their parents and find that the distance between the residences of members of different generations, as well as other socio-economic and demographic factors, affect the frequency of contact. The study is based on data from the 1988 Mainichi Newspapers/Nihon University Japanese National Family Survey.     

Intergenerational Transmission of Multipartner Fertility

Using data from administrative registers for the period 1970–2007 in Norway and Sweden, we investigate the intergenerational transmission of multipartner fertility. We find that men and women with half-siblings are more likely to have children with more than one partner. The differences are greater for those with younger versus older half-siblings, consistent with the additional influence of parental separation that may not arise when one has only older half-siblings. The additional risk for those with both older and younger half-siblings suggests that complexity in childhood family relationships also contributes to multipartner fertility. Only a small part of the intergenerational association is accounted for by education in the first and second generations. The association is to some extent gendered. Half-siblings are associated with a greater risk of women having children with a new partner in comparison with men. In particular, maternal half-siblings are more strongly associated with multipartner fertility than paternal half-siblings only for women.     

Gender and Intergenerational Co-residence in Egypt and Tunisia

This paper compares the levels and determinants of intergenerational co-residence among older women and men in Egypt and Tunisia. Women in both settings have higher odds than do men of living in child-headed households, largely because women more often are widowed and have fewer economic resources. In Tunisia, women have higher odds than do men of living in child-headed households partly because of their poorer health. In Egypt, the odds of living in parent- and child-headed intergenerational households for unmarried compared to married older adults are higher for women than men. Disparate needs and marital histories likely contribute to the different living arrangements of older women and men in these settings.     

Explaining age differences in women’s emotional well-being: The role of subjective experiences of aging

ABSTRACT

Our study examines explanations for the “paradox” of older women’s better emotional well-being compared with younger women. We consider the role of subjective experiences of aging in a society that devalues older women. Using a sample of women (n = 872) from the National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States (1995–1996 and 2004–2006), we examine the role of five components of the subjective experience of aging in explaining older women’s better emotional well-being compared with younger women: age identity, conceptions of the timing of middle age, aging attitudes, aging anxieties, and self-assessed physiological changes. We find that, compared with women 50–54 years old, those 35–39 years old report lower positive affect, and those 25–49 report higher negative affect. These patterns are partially explained by younger women’s greater anxiety about declines in health and attractiveness and older women’s more youthful identities. Our study underscores the value of considering the implications of our ageist and sexist society for women’s emotional well-being across adulthood.     

The marital satisfaction of differently aged couples

We investigate how the marital age gap affects the evolution of marital satisfaction over the duration of marriage using household panel data from Australia. We find that men tend to be more satisfied with younger wives and less satisfied with older wives. Interestingly, women likewise tend to be more satisfied with younger husbands and less satisfied with older husbands. Marital satisfaction declines with marital duration for both men and women in differently aged couples relative to those in similarly aged couples. These relative declines erase the initial higher levels of marital satisfaction experienced by men married to younger wives and women married to younger husbands within 6 to 10 years of marriage. A possible mechanism is that differently aged couples are less resilient to negative shocks compared to similarly aged couples, which we find some supportive evidence for.     

Age at marriage is rising for Asian women and men,according to new data

The social transformations in Asia are described: delayed age at marriage and the proportions marrying. Policy implications are ascertained. The norm for female age at marriage has risen from 15 years to 17-18 years in south Asia, and from 18 years to 24 years and older in east Asia. Men's marriage age has also risen but not as much. Concurrent changes have occurred with fertility declines and small family sizes and lower population growth, with changing roles for women, and with emergent youth subcultures and increased prevalence of premarital sexual behavior. The number of singles is rising and expected to continue to rise. Examples are given of marriage age changes for Nepal and Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, South Korea, and regional totals. Southeast Asian countries experienced less dramatic changes, and changes primarily in the 20-24 year old group (from 30% to 74% of single women). Change for men has been less regular and with less magnitude. In Southeast Asia, the rise in marriage age for men has risen only 1-2 years compared with women. East Asia patterns vary by country, i.e., South Korean increases of 6 years, Taiwanese increases of 4 years, and 2 years in Japan. Single males have been common in South and Southeast Asia, while in East Asia married male teens 25 years are rare. Marriage timing for men is not as closely associated as for women with social and cultural change. Downturns for men follow momentous, temporary disruptions such as happen during wars and periods of migration, while women's patterns are more reflective of structural change. The trend for never marrying is on the increase, particularly for men in Japan (1.1% in the 1920s to 18% in the early 1980s for men 50 years). Women not ever marrying are increasing in Thailand, Bangladesh, and Hong Kong. Never marrying is common in urban or educated populations, i.e., Singapore, Thailand, and Philippines. The implications are a longer gap between successive generations and a shorter period of exposure to risk of conception. Research findings have shown that a 1 year delay in age at 1st marriage reduces fertility by 20% of a child. Schooling delays marriage age as well as marriage laws, but structural and economic changes may be more important than policy changes. Policies affect the status of women and opportunities.     

Intergenerational patterns of teenage fertility

One of the frequently cited consequences of teen childbearing is the repetition of early births across generations, which thereby perpetuates a cycle of poverty and disadvantage. We use data from the 1988 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), Cycle IV, to examine trends and determinants of the intergenerational teen fertility link for women who reached adolescence between the 1950s and the 1980s. We find that daughters of both white and black teen mothers face significantly higher risks of teen childbearing than daughters of older mothers. We also find, more generally, that patterns of teenage family formation (i.e., both marriage and childbearing behaviors) tend to be repeated intergenerationally. The results suggest that the intrafamily propensity for early childbearing is not inherited biologically, at least not through factors related to the timing of puberty. Rather, the intergenerational patterns appear to operate at least in part through the socioeconomic and family context in which children grow up.     

社会网络视角下中国农村成年男性初婚风险的影响因素分析

在婚姻挤压背景下,男性拥有较多的社会网络资源是否意味着他们有更多结识异性和获得应急性经济支持的机会,从而增加了其初婚的概率?利用2008年西安交通大学人口与发展研究所在安徽X县调查的数据,从社会网络角度出发,采用事件史分析方法分析影响18~50岁农村男性初婚风险水平的因素。分析结果表明,当前农村男性的初婚年龄主要集中在22~27岁之间,27岁以上仍未结婚的男性,其成婚的概率急剧下降,成为婚姻市场的弱势群体;男性自身的特征和资源拥有状况,包括婚前社会网络、个人经济和非经济特征、家庭和社区因素,往往决定着个人的初婚风险水平,一般来说,男性自身特征和资源拥有状况越差,结婚的可能性越小。     

Risk preferences and the timing of marriage and childbearing

The existing literature on marriage and fertility decisions pays little attention to the roles played by risk preferences and uncertainty. However given uncertainty regarding the availability of suitable marriage partners, the ability to contracept, and the ability to conceive, women's risk preferences might be expected to play an important role in marriage and fertility timing decisions. By using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), I find that measured risk preferences have a significant effect on the timing of both marriage and fertility. Highly risk-tolerant women are more likely to delay marriage, consistent with either a search model of marriage or a risk-pooling explanation. In addition, risk preferences affect fertility timing in a way that differs by marital status and education, and that varies over the life cycle. Greater tolerance for risk leads to earlier births at young ages, consistent with these women being less likely to contracept effectively. In addition, as the subgroup of college-educated, unmarried women nears the end of their fertile periods, highly risk-tolerant women are likely to delay childbearing relative to their more risk-averse counterparts and are therefore less likely to become mothers. These findings may have broader implications for both individual and societal well-being.     

Timing effects on first marriage: twentieth-century experience in England and Wales and the USA

Recent substantial declines in first marriage in Western countries have been accompanied by increases in the average age at first marriage. Since the period proportion ever marrying, PEM, is sensitive to cohort tempo changes, the recent fall in the PEM may simply reflect cohort delays in marriage. The importance of timing factors is examined in the light of twentieth-century experience of first marriage in England and Wales and the USA. Using a variant of the Timing Index developed in research on fertility, we measure cohort timing effects for marriage and calculate an adjusted PEM. After examining twentieth-century trends in nuptiality for men and women, we find substantial tempo effects on the period PEM. Adjusted PEM values show a real decline in marriage for cohorts, but that decline is considerably smaller than the one shown by the unadjusted figures. This is especially true for England and Wales, where the decline in marriage was much greater.     

A Sudden Transition: Household Changes for Middle Aged U.S. Women in the Twentieth Century

Between 1900 and 1990, the percentage of U.S. white women aged 40-69 living with a child of their own fell from 63% to 27%, with three fourths of that change occurring between 1940 and 1960. Historical census data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series and longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics allow an historical and contemporary examination of co-residence patterns among these women. Analysis reveals three eras: a system of co-residence in the early twentieth century, a sudden transition toward separate households at mid century, and the maintenance of that separate household system thereafter. The scholarly literature features cultural, demographic, and economic explanations for the long-term decline in co-residence, but has given little attention to the rapid mid-century shift. Analysis of IPUMS data confirms the long-term effects of declines in mortality and fertility, and concomitant declines in the age of mothers at last birth, but also points to a sharp drop in the age of children at marriage in the mid-twentieth century. These factors raised the potential for the formation of separate households, but this historical era was also a propitious one for separation: income gains for young workers were unprecedented, the labor force participation of married women rose, and immigration fell. Analysis of PSID data from 1968 to 2009 confirms the salience of children's socioeconomic circumstances-particularly their marriage and employment prospects but also the increasing availability of higher education-in maintaining the separate household system. While the data analyzed allow only inferences about cultural factors, the resiliency of the new household system, even in periods of economic decline, suggests that it is now likely buttressed by strong normative views.     

Family Structure Transitions and Changes in Maternal Resources and Well-being

This article uses data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to examine whether family instability is associated with changes in perceived social support, material hardship, maternal depression, and parenting stress among mothers of young children. In addition to accounting for the number of transitions that a mother experiences during the first five years of her child’s life, we pay close attention to the type and timing of these transitions. We find that mothers who transition to cohabitation or marriage with their child’s biological father experience declines in material hardship and that those who transition to cohabitation or marriage with another man exhibit modest declines in both material hardship and depression. Mothers who exit cohabiting or marital relationships encounter decreases in perceived social support and increases in material hardship, depression, and parenting stress. Overall, our results suggest that both the type and, to a much lesser degree, the timing of family structure transitions may influence maternal well-being.     

Unemployment,Nonstandard Employment,and Fertility: Insights From Japan’s “Lost 20 Years”

In this study, we examine relationships of unemployment and nonstandard employment with fertility. We focus on Japan, a country characterized by a prolonged economic downturn, significant increases in both unemployment and nonstandard employment, a strong link between marriage and childbearing, and pronounced gender differences in economic roles and opportunities. Analyses of retrospective employment, marriage, and fertility data for the period 1990–2006 indicate that changing employment circumstances for men are associated with lower levels of marriage, while changes in women’s employment are associated with higher levels of marital fertility. The latter association outweighs the former, and results of counterfactual standardization analyses indicate that Japan’s total fertility rate would have been 10 % to 20 % lower than the observed rate after 1995 if aggregate- and individual-level employment conditions had remained unchanged from the 1980s. We discuss the implications of these results in light of ongoing policy efforts to promote family formation and research on temporal and regional variation in men’s and women’s roles within the family.     

Assessing the Predictive Value of Fertility Expectations Through a Cognitive–Social Model

This paper grounds its analysis in a novel model (Bachrach and Morgan in Popul Dev Rev, 39:459–485, 2013) that suggests that responses to questions about fertility intentions may reflect distinct phenomena at distinct points in the life course. The model suggests that women form "true" intentions when their circumstances make the issue of childbearing salient and urgent enough to draw the cognitive resources needed to make a conscious plan; before this, women report intentions based on cognitive images of family and self. We test the implications of this model for reported fertility expectations using NLSY79 data that measure expectations throughout the life course. We find that early in the life course, before marriage and parenthood, women’s fertility expectations are associated with family background and cognitive images of family and future self. Later in the life course, as women experience life course transitions that confer statuses normatively associated with childbearing—such as marriage—and parenthood itself, their reported expectations are better predictors of their fertility than before they passed these life course milestones. Our empirical results provide support for a model which has important implications for both the measurement and conceptualization of women’s intended and expected fertility.     

The Gendered Double Standard of Aging in US Marriage Markets

Using data on marriages collected in most US states between 1970 and 1988, we show that the older men are when they marry, the more years senior to their brides they are, whether it is a first or higher‐order marriage. While older men with more education marry down in age slightly more than less educated older men, the pattern of men marrying further down if they marry later holds strongly for all education groups. We consider several possible explanations for the tendency of men to marry further down in age if they are older at marriage. While we have no direct measure of physical attractiveness, we argue that the most compelling interpretation is that men, more than women, evaluate potential spouses on the basis of appearance. Because the prevailing standard of beauty favors young women, the older men are when they marry, the less they find women their own age attractive relative to younger women, leading them to marry further down in age if they are older at marriage. The consequence for women of men's preference for youth is more often that they remain unmarried than that they end up married to much older or less educated men.     

The influence of labour force participation and education on fertility in Thailand

Abstract Increasingly, discussion of the appropriateness and effectiveness of methods to limit population growth have focussed both on measures which seek to provide new and efficient contraceptives to an ever larger target population and on those measures which go beyond family planning to emphasize the need for adoption of policies 'expressly related to family roles and opportunities for legitimate alternative satisfactions and activities'.(1) Proponents of the latter course of action argur that such policies offer greater promise of reduction in family size because they directly assault the motivational framework of reproduction. Among the means suggested for limiting reproductioe within marriage as well as postponing marriage is modification of the complementarity of the rolen of men and women.(2) Of particular interest in this regard is the nature of the relation betweens female labour force participation and education and fertility, and the implications these relations may have for future fertility reduction, particularly in the developing world.     

Effect of family structure on life satisfaction: australian evidence

How do family arrangements affect subjective well-being? We investigate this issue using data pooled from the IsssA and HILDA, both large, representative national samples of Australia (pooled n=38 447). Our regression analysis of cross-sectional and panel data examines how large are the differences in life satisfaction according to marital status and cohabitation. We find that women and men in formal marriages experience higher levels of life satisfaction than do people in other family arrangements. Moreover, both multiple tests in the cross-section, and tests controlling for prior happiness in the panel analysis, suggest that this is a causal relationship. Aggregating up the levels of life satisfaction generated by different marriage and cohabitation arrangements across a lifetime, suggests that a life-long marriage is the most satisfying. Early divorce followed by an enduring second marriage is little worse (because little time is spent outside the married state). But divorce without remarriage, or long lasting cohabitation without formal marriage, reduce the lifetime sum of subjective well-being by 4–12% for both women and men.     

Demography of brideprice and dowry: Causes and consequences of the Indian marriage squeeze

The paper investigates whether past declines in mortality could have created a huge deficit of eligible men in the marriage market, and whether the ensuing competition for mates could be responsible for the coercive character the dowry system of marriage has assumed in India. New indices have been developed to measure the trends in bridegroom availability that aid in the inquiry into the demographic origins of marriage squeeze. It is contended that the marriage squeeze against women was particularly intense in India because mortality decline, in addition to age structural changes, drastically reduced the number of widowers in the population who once accounted for about one-fifth of the annual supply of bridegrooms. Our projections indicate that, as a result of recent declines in fertility, the marriage squeeze against females will ease substantially by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, and that marriages of men will begin to be delayed more than those of women.     

The transmission of women’s fertility, human capital, and work orientation across immigrant generations

Using the 1995–2011 March Current Population Survey and 1970–2000 Census data, we find that the fertility, education, and labor supply of second-generation women (US-born women with at least one foreign-born parent) are significantly positively affected by the immigrant generation’s levels of these variables, with the effect of the fertility and labor supply of women from the mother’s source country generally larger than that of women from the father’s source country and the effect of the education of men from the father’s source country larger than that of women from the mother’s source country. We present some evidence that suggests our findings for fertility and labor supply are due at least in part to intergenerational transmission of gender roles. Transmission rates for immigrant fertility and labor supply between generations are higher than for education, but there is considerable intergenerational assimilation toward native levels for all three of these outcomes.     

The relative stability of cohabiting and marital unions for children

Children are increasingly born into cohabiting parent families, but we know little to date about the implications of this family pattern for children's lives. We examine whether children born into premarital cohabitation and first marriages experience similar rates of parental disruption, and whether marriage among cohabiting parents enhances union stability. These issues are important because past research has linked instability in family structure with lower levels of child well-being. Drawing on the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth, we find that white, black and Hispanic children born to cohabiting parents experience greater levels of instability than children born to married parents. Moreover, black and Hispanic children whose cohabiting parents marry do not experience the same levels of family stability as those born to married parents; among white children, however, the marriage of cohabiting parents raises levels of family stability to that experienced by children born in marriage. The findings from this paper contribute to the debate about the benefits of marriage for children.