Giornate di Studio sulla Popolazione (Popdays), Giornate di Studio sulla Popolazione 2017

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Educational Assortative Mating and Couples’ Fertility
Alessandra Trimarchi, Jan Van Bavel

Building: Main Venue Building
Room: room 8
Date: 2017-02-09 02:00 PM – 03:30 PM
Last modified: 2017-01-23

Abstract


Scholars usually approach fertility from women’s perspective. However, omitting partners’ characteristics may bias the results. We extend previous literature about the effect of partners’ educational characteristics on fertility, considering the level of education and the field of study. The analytical strategy comes in two steps. First, we estimate the earning potential by field of study, country, and sex with European Labor Force Surveys. Second, we link the results of these estimations to the Generation and Gender Surveys of eight European countries, and we model couples’ transition to first and higher order parities jointly, accounting for couples’ unobserved characteristics. Findings suggest that both partners face opportunity costs of fertility with an increasing earning potential in terms of both higher educational level and more profitable field of study. Next, we found that pairings characterized by an imbalance of education and earning potential in favor of the man are more conducive to fertility compared to pairings where the woman is more educated than the man. However, it also emerges that a highly educated woman is more likely to go beyond the first child if she partnered with a highly educated man.