文档介绍：DO SIBLINGS’ FERTILITY DECISIONS INFLUENCE
EACH OTHER?*
TORKILD HOVDE LYNGSTAD AND ALEXIA PRSKAWETZ
Individuals’ fertility decisions are shaped not only by their own characteristics and life course
paths but also by social interaction with others. However, in practice, it is diffi cult to disentangle the
role of social interaction from other factors, such as individual and family background variables. We
measure social interaction through the cross-sibling infl uences on fertility. Continuous-time hazard
models are estimated separately for women’s fi rst and second births. In addition to individual socio-
economic variables, demographic variables, and an unobserved factor specifi c to each sibling pair,
siblings’ birth events and their timing enter as time-varying covariates. We use data from longitudinal
population-wide Norwegian administrative registers. The data cover more than 110,000 sibling pairs
and include the siblings’ fertility, education, e, and marital histories. Our results indicate that
cross-sibling infl uences are relatively strong for the respondents’fi rst births but weak for the second
parity transition.
Studies on fertility timing in developed countries give a strong explanatory role to in-
dividual life course transitions. These include such transitions as the end of educational
enrollment, the start of or a change in career, geographical mobility, and transitions related
to entry into and exit from marital and nonmarital coresidential partnerships. The post-
ponement of and increasing variability in some of these processes has often been associated
with the observed delay in childbearing. To account for fertility preferences in general,
family background variables—or more generally, early life experiences—constitute key
indicators (Axinn, Clarkberg, and Thornton 1994). However, individuals’ fertility behavior
depends not only on family background variables and their life course paths but also on
the behavior