Laboratory

Fertility and Well-Being

At a Glance Projects Publications Team

Project

Analyzing Male Fertility: Toward a Comparative Approach

Conducted by Mikko Myrskylä; Christian Dudel, Susie Lee, Mathias Lerch, Kieron Barclay; in Collaboration with Jessica Nisén (University of Helsinki, Finland), Sebastian Klüsener (Federal Institute for Population Research, Wiesbaden, Germany), Martin Kolk (Stockholm University, Sweden)

Detailed Description

This project takes a comparative perspective on male fertility trends. Birth data usually provide information on the mother for almost all births, but information on the father is frequently missing in a non-negligible number of cases. This substantially affects our ability to study male fertility trends from a comparative perspective. For births with missing information on the age of the father, we therefore use imputation conditional on information on the mother's age. We have shown in a methodological paper that this approach generally outperforms approaches that ignore available data on the mother.

In a first study on western and eastern Germany, we have shown that male and female fertility varies substantially across subnational regions. Whereas eastern German women have recently exceeded their western German counterparts in their fertility levels, eastern German men still report lower fertility than do western German males. This is largely because the sex ratios in eastern Germany are relatively unbalanced due to the high levels of out-migration of young women in the 2000s. In a second study, we are taking a comparative perspective across countries. The first findings have shown that in most high-income countries male fertility levels are lower than those of females. The countries also seem to differ substantially in the age differences observed between mothers and fathers, conditional on the mother's age.

We have also contributed a study on another understudied aspect of male fertility – reproductive maturation in boys. We used longitudinal data from the nationally representative sample of Korean adolescents. This provided us with a unique opportunity for studying male puberty, using a hitherto underutilized biomarker: age at first nocturnal ejaculation. We have shown that, similar to previous findings on menarche in girls, boys in father-absent households reported having first nocturnal ejaculation three months earlier on average.

Publications

Dudel, C.; Cheng, Y. A.; Klüsener, S.:

Shifting parental age differences in high-income countries: insights and implications

Population and Development Review. accepted. (2023)    

Lee, D. S.; Semenchenko, H.:

Father absence and pubertal timing in Korean boys and girls

Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health, 1–11. (2023)    

Schubert, H.-A.; Dudel, C.; Kolobova, M.; Myrskylä, M.:

Revisiting the J-shape: human development and fertility in the United States

MPIDR Working Paper WP-2023-022. (2023)    

Dudel, C.; Klüsener, S.:

Male-female fertility differentials across 17 high-income countries: insights from a new data resource

European Journal of Population 37:2, 417–441. (2021)    

Dudel, C.; Cheng, Y. A.; Klüsener, S.:

The unexplored parental age gap in an era of fertility postponement

MPIDR Working Paper WP-2020-018. (2020)    

Pötzsch, O.; Klüsener, S.; Dudel, C.:

Wie hoch ist die Kinderzahl von Männern?

WISTA - Wirtschaft und Statistik 2020:5, 59–77. (2020)    

Dudel, C.; Klüsener, S.:

New opportunities for comparative male fertility research: insights from a new data resource based on high-quality birth registers

MPIDR Working Paper WP-2019-023. (2019)    

Dudel, C.; Klüsener, S.:

Estimating men's fertility from vital registration data with missing values

Population Studies 73:3, 439–449. (2019)    

Dudel, C.:

Die Kinder der Väter

Demografische Forschung Aus Erster Hand 14:2, 3–3. (2017)    

Dudel, C.; Klüsener, S.:

Estimating male fertility from vital registration data with missing values

MPIDR Working Paper WP-2017-019. (2017)