Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 75-09(E), Section: A.

Adviser: Hannah Bruckner.

This dissertation, generally speaking, engages with the empirical study of human fertility and investigates how first and second birth timing and childlessness at the end of women's fertile life span are related to educational attainment, labor market behavior, and gendered couple dynamics in the United States and Germany. Three separate article-style empirical chapters address two distinct research questions. The first question is concerned with the childbearing behavior of women with post-graduate education in the United States and asks whether their median ages at first birth, childlessness at age 40 and beyond, and labor force participation differ from those of women with college education 'only', and how these patterned changed over the birth cohorts 1921-1980 (chapter 1). The second, question aims at understanding how couple-level dynamics such relative socio-economic resources and the division of household labor relate to couples' first and second birth hazards. Two separate chapters investigate this latter question for Germany (chapter 2) and the United States (chapter 3).

The first chapter uses the pooled CPS June Fertility Files from 1971-2010. The findings show that women with postgraduate education delay the first birth significantly longer, and remain childless more often than college educated women without advanced training. Also, mothers with postgraduate education are more likely to be employed and work longer hours than mothers with college education 'only'. The chapter finds, however, no evidence for an 'opting-out' movement from the labor market for recent birth cohorts of either educational group. Overall, the results underscore the importance of distinguishing between women with college education and women with postgraduate education when examining their family formation and employment processes. The second chapter uses the German Socio-Economic Panel and examines how relative resources and the division of domestic and care work relate to first and second birth hazards of married and cohabiting couples in three German birth cohorts (1950-65, 1966-75, 1976-85). The results indicate significant effects of educational pairings on first and second birth hazards; in particular, highly educated homogamous couples have larger second birth hazards than couples with less education or than couples with a highly educated wife and a husband with less education (1966-75 cohort). Furthermore, no effects of relative earnings on birth hazards have been found. The findings also suggest change in the relationship between the division of domestic work and birth hazards over birth cohorts. An increase in his contribution to housework is associated with a higher transition rate to parenthood in the youngest birth cohort (1976-85) only, while it increases the second birth hazard in the middle cohort, albeit among East German couples only (1966-75). The third chapter uses the NLSY79 to investigate the relationship between relative socio-economic resources and birth hazards among married US couples. The data don't contain time use measures, which means that the division of housework could not been included. The models, however, control for gender role preferences of the wives. In this chapter, the analyses are set up in a competing risk framework, to allow for the competing risk of union dissolution. Similar to the results on Germany in chapter two, the findings show that relative education is significantly related to second birth hazards, with highly educated homogamous couples displaying higher second birth transition rates. Relative income and gendered work arrangements appear, in contrast, not to have any significant association with first or second birth hazards in this cohort of married US couples. The latter two chapters contribute new evidence to a young but growing literature that examines couple-level effects on fertility.