The Empirical Analysis of East German Fertility after Unification: An Update

German unification led to a drastic decline in the East German birthrate. Recent explanations of this phenomena point to theimportance of an adjustment process of the East German patternwith often early births to the West German pattern with fairlylate births. The paper presents an update on previous analyses ofage specific birth rates, as well as a new micro-economic approachbased on individual data. The empirical evidence presented inthis paper supports the view that the sharp reduction in EastGerman fertility is in fact part of an adjustment process towardsWest German fertility patterns.