Monographie

När har vi råd att skaffa fler barn? En studie om hur inkomst påverkar fortsatt barnafödande

Abstract

This study investigates whether men’s and women’s income affect Swedish couples’ propensities to have a second and a third child during the 1980s and the 1990s. The study is based on administrative data on the childbearing of all Swedish co-residing couples with at least one common child. The results show that higher income of both the man and the woman increases the propensity to have a second child. The effects of the man’s and the woman’s income are very similar. For third births, we find instead that the effects of the two parental incomes are somewhat different. A high income of the woman increases the couple’s propensity to have another child. In contrast, the effect of the man’s income shows a u-formed pattern where couples with both high-income and low-income men have elevated third-birth rates. An important general result is that the effects of the woman’s and the man’s income hold independently of each other. Thus, both the father’s and the mother’s income matters individually. The combined income matters as well, but only to the extent that it constitutes the sum of the two individual incomes. This study lends no support to the notion that it is couples where the man is the main earner of income that has the highest propensity to have more children. On the contrary, for third births its is rather couples where the woman earns more than the man that have the highest propensity to have another child. Differences in second-birth rates by the level of earned income of the parents seem to have increased during the 1990s. No such change can be detected for third-birth rates.