Laboratory

Fertility and Well-Being

At a Glance Projects Publications Team

Research Area

Innovative Perspectives on the Fertility Transition

The demographic transition is one of the most remarkable social change processes of modern times. By now, virtually all populations around the globe experienced at least the onset of the fertility decline as part of this process. But we are also witnessing substantial spatial and social variation in the onset and intensity of the decline. The analysis of the fertility transition benefits from the fact that this process manifests itself through the reduction of quite clearly defined birth events that can be well monitored. Investigations of the transition may thus potentially allow us to improve our general understanding of how the social change process such as urbanization is emerging and spreading in space and time.

Projects in this research area use innovative perspectives to study this process. One focal point is to provide a comparative perspective on male fertility trends in high-income countries. Although official statistics often provide for almost all births information on the mother, information on the father is frequently lacking for a non-negligible number of cases. We therefore develop and test methods that impute missing data on the father, conditional on information available on the mother. We use data on long-term trends in male fertility from official statistical sources. The derived datasets allow us to bring comparative investigations of the relationship between male and female fertility trends to a new level.

The projects in this research area benefit from recent methodological advancements, and from recent improvements in the availability of individual-level data for historical and contemporary times that allow us to study the process at both the micro and the macro levels. We can thus gain new insights into important mechanisms and determinants of spatial and social variation in the onset and intensity of the fertility transition around the globe.

Projects of this Research Area