Essays on Socio-Economic Differentiation in European Fertility. The Impact of Economic Context and Social Policy by Wood Jonas (review)

In this book, Jonas Wood offers a comprehensive analysis of socio-economic differentiation in reproductive behaviour. Extensive geographical coverage also enables him to take into account differences in economic context and social policy across European countries.

The book opens with a well-written introductory chapter summarizing the relevant theoretical ideas; the author presents not only the standard economic arguments (new home economics) but also cultural theories (second demographic transition) and the institutional aspects (welfare state, norms, gender equality) of differential fertility.

The four main chapters present original empirical analysis; an additional chapter focuses on data quality. Each chapter is structured as an independent research article as the book is derived from Wood’s doctoral research at the University of Antwerp under the supervision of Karel Neels. Jonas Wood holds a PhD in sociology but his work is strongly interdisciplinary, covering cultural, economic, demographic and institutional aspects. Wood also holds a Master’s degree in statistics and uses sound statistical and econometric methods.

The question of how varying configurations of economic and institutional characteristics across European countries coincide with different demographic behaviours is of strong policy relevance in a context where below-replacement fertility levels represent a serious challenge to the financial sustainability of pension systems and public health care. The macro-economic contexts Wood addresses vary from education expansion to economic fluctuations and family policy settings. The combination of individual-level survey data, primarily from the Generations and Gender Survey (GGS) and the European Social Survey (ESS), and aggregate-level data (OECD, World Bank) make a cross-national comparative approach possible. The surveys focus on fertility, education and employment viewed retrospectively at the time of the interview (i.e., information is available on length of education, time elapsed since first cohabitation, since first job, etc.).

Throughout the work, the issue of self-selection bias for higher order childbearing behaviour is accurately taken into account. Women at risk for a second or third birth may constitute a selective group as they already have one child. Self-selection into the group “at risk” for having a second or third child could be linked to socio-economic characteristics such as education. The opportunity costs of having a first child are heaviest for highly educated women, and those who decide to do so despite those costs might have particular characteristics – e.g., being more family-oriented – that are potentially related to the probability of their having more than one child. This selectivity may affect the impact of education on the transition to second or third childbirth as well as sensitivity to economic and institutional context. To control for this, Wood proposes a random effects discrete-time hazard model, in which the random effect is included at the individual level (shared frailty). This allows for controlling for time-constant unobserved individual-level characteristics and therefore captures selectivity in connection with the transition to parenthood. The author finds that women-specific characteristics connected to timing of entry into motherhood have little impact on the educational gradient in progression to second and third births. Selection in terms of timing and occurrence of first births thus does not affect educational patterns in progression to second and third births. This is an important and helpful insight for research based on datasets where the panel is too short to apply shared frailty models.

The first research chapter or essay investigates the educational gradient in completed fertility. Cohort parity progression ratios to the first, second and third birth up to age 39 are estimated as a function of education for women born between 1940 and 1961 on the basis of data from 13 European countries (GGS). The regression-based proportions are then illustrated by cohort and education level. No causal relationship was found, since not only is the number of children a woman has at the end of her childbearing life likely to be influenced by education level but fertility level...