Recent patterns in group-specific total fertility in Finland

Jan M Hoem, Stockholm University
Marika Jalovaara, University of Turku
Cornelia Muresan, Babes-Bolyai University

Applying a procedure that has recently been rediscovered and extended, we have studied recent patterns in duration-based group-specific Total Fertility Rates in register data for some 110 000 Finnish women (net after extraction of 11% of the register total and elimination of ineligible records). We are able to study women in cohabitational and in marital unions, separately, and we can subdivide the latter according to the length of any pre-marital cohabitation. Total marital fertility turns out to be highest among the directly married and it declines monotonically as the length of pre-marital cohabitation increases, though the total-fertility component of pre-marital periods partly compensates for the “loss” in total fertility computed for marital periods alone. Married women have much the higher total fertility in most groups. (The TFR is about 1.9 for the directly married and 1.1 for cohabitants.) We can also study patterns in the TFR by completed educational attainment (a time-varying covariate), and have found a watershed as women have a tertiary education, with considerably lower fertility among the highly educated, particularly for women in consensual unions. Among women under education (also time-varying), we find a relatively high fertility in both marital and non-marital unions. [We have finished a first draft of the complete paper.] [Authors: All authors have contributed equally to this paper.]