IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/dem/demres/v28y2013i14.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Recent fertility patterns of Finnish women by union status

Author

Listed:
  • Jan M. Hoem

    (Stockholms Universitet)

  • Marika Jalovaara

    (Turun Yliopisto (University of Turku))

  • Cornelia Muresan

    (Babeș-Bolyai University)

Abstract

Background: Remarkably little is known about the significance of consensual unions for fertility. This is true everywhere, but the lacuna is more important in the Nordic countries where there is so much childbearing outside of marriage, mostly in consensual unions. The purpose of this paper is to help fill this hole in our knowledge for Finland. Objective: Unusually good register data enable us to study recent fertility trends by union status (married, cohabiting, neither) using records for some 112,000 Finnish women, or 11% of all women at fertile ages. Methods: Our description of fertility is based on group-specific duration-based TFRs, which is the number of children borne by a woman who remains in the group throughout her reproductive life, as computed from the fertility rates for a synthetic cohort. This is an intuitively appealing metric that has been taken into systematic use only recently. Results: We find substantial fertility differences between women who cohabit, women who marry directly (i.e., without pre-marital cohabitation), and women who marry their cohabitational partner. As one would also expect in Finland, cohabiting women have much lower fertility than married women. The marital TFR is highest among the directly-married and declines monotonically as the length of pre-marital cohabitation increases, even when premarital childbearing is included in the count. As far as we know the latter relationship has not been shown before, because extensive data for complete cohabitational unions have not been available for other populations. Conclusions: The Finnish data are unique, even among the Nordic countries, in that they contain individual-level life histories of family dynamics that cover consensual unions from their very start. Fertility analysis would benefit if data similar to the Finnish were to become available, because analyses that rely on civil status as an indicator of union status barely add anything to what we already know about today's family dynamics.

Suggested Citation

  • Jan M. Hoem & Marika Jalovaara & Cornelia Muresan, 2013. "Recent fertility patterns of Finnish women by union status," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 28(14), pages 409-420.
    • Handle: RePEc:dem:demres:v:28:y:2013:i:14
    DOI: 10.4054/DemRes.2013.28.14
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol28/14/28-14.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.4054/DemRes.2013.28.14?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. repec:cai:poeine:pope_605_0701 is not listed on IDEAS
    2. repec:cai:poeine:pope_504_0415 is not listed on IDEAS
    3. Cornelia Muresan & Jan M. Hoem, 2010. "The negative educational gradients in Romanian fertility," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 22(4), pages 95-114.
    4. repec:cai:popine:popu_p1986_41n4-5_0747 is not listed on IDEAS
    5. Nicholas B. Barkalov, 2005. "Changes in the Quantum of Russian Fertility During the 1980s and Early 1990s," Population and Development Review, The Population Council, Inc., vol. 31(3), pages 545-556, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Heini Vaisanen, 2017. "The timing of abortions, births, and union dissolutions in Finland," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 37(28), pages 889-916.
    2. Marika Jalovaara & Anneli Miettinen, 2013. "Does his paycheck also matter?," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 28(31), pages 881-916.
    3. Jan M. Hoem & Cornelia Mureşan & Mihaela Hărăguş, 2013. "Recent features of cohabitational and marital fertility in Romania," MPIDR Working Papers WP-2013-007, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany.
    4. Benoît Laplante & Ana Laura Fostik, 2015. "Two period measures for comparing the fertility of marriage and cohabitation," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 32(14), pages 421-442.
    5. Julia Hellstrand & Jessica Nisén & Mikko Myrskylä, 2022. "Less Partnering, Less Children, or Both? Analysis of the Drivers of First Birth Decline in Finland Since 2010," European Journal of Population, Springer;European Association for Population Studies, vol. 38(2), pages 191-221, May.
    6. Linus Andersson, 2023. "The Role of Gender Differences in Partnering and Re-partnering for Gender Differences in Completed Fertility," Population Research and Policy Review, Springer;Southern Demographic Association (SDA), vol. 42(2), pages 1-28, April.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Jan M. Hoem & Cornelia Mureşan & Mihaela Hărăguş, 2013. "Recent features of cohabitational and marital fertility in Romania," MPIDR Working Papers WP-2013-007, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany.
    2. Leonardo Menchini & Sheila Marnie, 2007. "Demographic Challenges and the Implications for Children in CEE/CIS," Papers inwopa07/47, Innocenti Working Papers.
    3. Irina Kalabikhina & Alla Tyndik, 2014. "Does current demographic policy in Russia impact on fertility of different educational groups?," Working Papers 0010, Moscow State University, Faculty of Economics.
    4. Jonas Wood & Sebastian Klüsener & Karel Neels & Mikko Myrskylä, 2017. "Is a positive link between human development and fertility attainable? Insights from the Belgian vanguard case," MPIDR Working Papers WP-2017-014, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany.
    5. Brainerd, Elizabeth, 2010. "The Demographic Transformation of Post-Socialist Countries," WIDER Working Paper Series 015, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
    6. Martin Klesment & Allan Puur & Leen Rahnu & Luule Sakkeus, 2014. "Varying association between education and second births in Europe," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 31(27), pages 813-860.
    7. Jan M. Hoem & Cornelia Mureşan, 2011. "An Extension of the Conventional TFR [Une extension de l'indicateur conjoncturel de fécondité]," European Journal of Population, Springer;European Association for Population Studies, vol. 27(4), pages 389-402, November.
    8. Tamás Bartus & Lívia Murinkó & Ivett Szalma & Bernadett Szél, 2013. "The effect of education on second births in Hungary," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 28(1), pages 1-32.
    9. Eleonora Mussino & Alyson A. van Raalte, 2008. "Fertility of migrants: a comparative study between Italy and Russia," MPIDR Working Papers WP-2008-026, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany.
    10. Jonas Wood & Karel Neels & Tine Kil, 2014. "The educational gradient of childlessness and cohort parity progression in 14 low fertility countries," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 31(46), pages 1365-1416.
    11. Mathias Lerch, 2013. "Fertility Decline During Albania’s Societal Crisis and its Subsequent Consolidation," European Journal of Population, Springer;European Association for Population Studies, vol. 29(2), pages 195-220, May.
    12. Bilal Barakat & Rachel Durham, 2013. "Drop-out mayors and graduate farmers: Educational fertility differentials by occupational status and industry in six European countries," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 28(42), pages 1213-1262.
    13. Joshua R. Goldstein & Tomáš Sobotka & Aiva Jasilioniene, 2009. "The end of 'lowest-low' fertility? (with supplementary materials)," MPIDR Working Papers WP-2009-029, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany.
    14. Jonas Wood & Leen Marynissen & Jessica Nisén & Peter Fallesen & Karel Neels & Alessandra Trimarchi & Lars Dommermuth & Ruben Van Gaalen & Martin Kolk & Pekka Martikainen, 2021. "Regional variation in women’s education-fertility nexus in Northern and Western Europe," MPIDR Working Papers WP-2021-021, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany.
    15. Elizabeth Brainerd, 2010. "The Demographic Transformation of Post-Socialist Countries: Causes, Consequences, and Questions," WIDER Working Paper Series wp-2010-015, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
    16. Eva-Maria Merz & Aart C. Liefbroer, 2017. "Cross-national differences in the association between educational attainment and completed fertility. Do welfare regimes matter?," Vienna Yearbook of Population Research, Vienna Institute of Demography (VID) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, vol. 15(1), pages 095-120.
    17. Jan M. Hoem & Cornelia Mureşan, 2011. "The Total Marital Fertility Rate and Its Extensions [Le taux de fécondité totale dans le mariage et ses extensions]," European Journal of Population, Springer;European Association for Population Studies, vol. 27(3), pages 295-312, August.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    fertility; Finland; total fertility rate (TFR);
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J1 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics
    • Z0 - Other Special Topics - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:dem:demres:v:28:y:2013:i:14. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Editorial Office (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.demogr.mpg.de/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.