October 06, 2025 | News | Congratulations

Henrik Schubert is Proud Recipient of an Award-Winning Doctorate

Henrik Schubert, from the Department of Social Demography, successfully defended his doctoral thesis, titled “The fertility puzzle. Trends and patterns of male and female fertility.”, at the University of Oxford. For one of his dissertation chapters, “Too many men”, he received the Julia Mead Knox Memorial Prize from the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science at the renowned University of Oxford.

Two men standing in front of the Max Planck Institute for demogrpahic research in Rostock. They look happy.

Henrik Schubert and Mikko Myrskylä. © MPIDR

In his dissertation, Henrik Schubert delves into trends in fertility and offers captivating insights. Total fertility rates plummeted in the United States and the Nordic countries during the 2010s. This decline presents an intriguing empirical puzzle because it occurred across regions and social groups, as well as in different welfare state contexts, making it challenging to comprehend.

Using large-scale population register data from various high-income countries, Henrik examined these recent fertility declines and drew conclusions about the driving factors. Throughout the thesis, attention is given to the contributions of both men and women. Moreover, subnational designs are employed to address the limitations of cross-country comparisons. His dissertation concludes that the drivers of recent fertility declines are multifactorial and pertain to social, cultural, economic, structural and biological factors.

Henrik offers new insights across the five empirical chapters of this dissertation. In the first two chapters, he examines the impact of human development and recent accelerations in secularization on fertility and its future trends. In the third chapter, he employs machine-learning to investigate the biological, social and health factors of the male and female partner influencing fecundity in couples. The second part of his thesis investigates gender differences in fertility. Henrik’s research showed when, where and if fertility for men and women is the same or different at the subnational level. In his last chapter, he investigates the impact of unbalanced partner markets on the widening gap in childlessness between men and women.

Henrik’s supervisor, Christian Dudel, says: “Henrik’s thesis makes substantive and methodological contributions to our understanding of why fertility changes and of the causes of differences in the fertility of men and women.”

Henrik was part of the International Max Planck Research School for Population, Health and Data Science (IMPRS-PHDS), a doctoral program that combines demography, epidemiology and data science. The dissertation was supervised by Christian Dudel, Christiaan Monden, Mikko Myrskylä. He was student at the Nuffield College, Oxford.