Partners' educational pairings and fertility across Europe

Abstract

We provide new evidence on the education-fertility relationship by using EU-SILC panel data on 17 countries to investigate how couples’ educational pairings predict their childbearing behaviour. We focus on differences in first, second and third birth rates between couples with varying combinations of partners’ education. Our results show that there are indeed important differences in how education relates to fertility depending on the education of the partner. First, homogamous highly educated couples show a distinct childbearing behaviour, at least in some countries. They tend to postpone the first birth most and display the highest transition rates to second and third births subsequently. Second, contrary to what may be expected based on conventional economic models of the family, hypergamous couples with a highly educated man and a lower educated female partner display among the lowest second and third birth transition rates across the majority of countries. Our findings underscore the relevance of interacting both partners’ education for a deeper understanding of the education-fertility relationship.