MPIDR Working Paper

Settlement size and fertility in the Nordic countries

Abstract

There is a growing body of literature that looks at the causes of below-replacement fertility in developed countries. While the variation in childbearing patterns across countries and between socio-economic groups within a country has been studied in detail, little is known about the differences in fertility patterns across settlements within a country. A few recent studies suggest that there are persistent differentials between high- and low-fertility settlements in contemporary Europe. This study examines fertility variation across settlements in four Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. We base our study on aggregate and individual-level register data. We first examine annual total and parity-specific fertility across settlement type from the mid-1970s to the early twenty-first century. We proceed to study the relative contribution of the socio-economic characteristics of the local populations and the characteristics of the settlements to this variation, using hazard regression models.