Early life environments and first-time parenthood: the experience of immigrant and native women in Sweden, 1990-2009

Serhiy Dekhtyar, Lund University

The purpose of the study is to investigate how the childbearing behavior of immigrants and natives in Sweden in 1990-2009 is affected by their exposure to exogenously-determined early life conditions. The aim is to uncover if differences in the propensity of becoming a mother across immigrant groups and between immigrant and native-born childless women in Sweden can be traced back to their dissimilar early life experiences. Having access to large population-based registers presents us with two opportunities. First, we are able to longitudinally adjust for a wide variety of socioeconomic characteristics that have been shown to affect fertility outcomes across the groups in question. More importantly, however, we are able to identify biological sibling pairs in the registers and account for unobserved familial confounding by using sibling fixed effects models, therefore strengthening the causal interpretation of early exposures’ effects. In essence, we regress sister differences in fertility outcomes on sister differences in early life conditions for a sub-sample of siblings we identified.