Fertility trends by social status

By V. Skirbekk. 2008

365 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article discusses how fertility relates to social status with the use of a new dataset, several times larger than the ones used so far. The status-fertility relation is investigated over several centuries, across world regions and by the type of status-measure. The study reveals that as fertility declines, there is a general shift from a positive to a negative or neutral status-fertility relation. Those with high income/wealth or high occupation/social class switch from having relatively many to fewer or the same number of children as others. Education, however, depresses fertility for as long as this relation is observed (from early in the 20th century).

Subfields: Demography, Gender Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cdd60a40b30f0f73922f7458ca6b6029205510b5

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Demography

In Gender Studies

Citations in the corpus

Fertility Theories: Can They Explain the Negative Fertility-Income Relationship? (2008, neutral): “We 20For example, Skirbekk (2008) (using a large data set including various world regions over time) finds that as fertility declines, there is a general shift from a positive to a negative or neutral status-fertility relation.”
Life expectancy and economic growth: the role of the demographic transition (2011, result): “This is true in particular when looking at longer time horizons (1960-2000), 39The data are taken from Soto and Cohen (2007). Similar results obtain for the widely used data provided by Barro and Lee (2001) and are available upon request.”
Projection of Populations by Level of Educational Attainment, Age and Sex for 120 Countries for 2005-2050 (2010, background): “Skirbekk (2008) finds that women's fertility is, on average, significantly lower for the more educated—around 30% lower when the highest and the least educated groups are compared—and that this gap is even greater in poorer, high fertility contexts.”
The Economic and Demographic Transition, Mortality, and Comparative Development (2013, neutral): “In addition, a higher T t reduces fertility by a differential fertility effect if, as characterized next, it increases the share of skilled workers, λ t , who have fewer children, see Skirbekk (2008) for evidence.”
Reproductive Behavior and Personality Traits of the Five Factor Model (2011, neutral): “…correlates with cognitive ability and educational achievement (Wainwright, Wright, Luciano, Geffen, & Martin, 2008), both of which are associated with postponement of childbearing and lower number of children (Hopcroft, 2006; Retherford & Sewell, 1989; Skirbekk, 2008), especially in women.”