Union dynamics and fertility, a comparative descriptive analysis

Micro-level relationships between union formation or dissolution and childbearing have implications for macro-level fertility: Union dissolution reduces opportunities for conceiving and bearing children, but at the same time, it produces a pool of persons who may enter new partnerships and produce ‘extra’ children. The balance between the two processes influences the observed macro-level fertility. For France, it was shown by Thomson et al (2012) that the incremental risk of childbearing is much greater when all of the woman’s children were born with previous partners, i.e., the re-partnered couple has no shared children. Because first-time parents are highly likely to have two children together, new partnerships are particularly significant for higher birth orders. In other countries we could obtain different results, according to the different socio-economic and cultural settings, e.g., according to the extent to which re-partnering and fertility outside the first marital union are more accepted and diffused or banned as undesirable. This paper extends the work done by Thompson et al. (2012) to different European countries. We will take advantage of the geographical richness of the GGS data and its inherently comparative design to provide a description of the process that links micro level union dynamics and macro-level fertility.