Whose social mobility matters to fertility behavior: his, hers or neither at certain statuses?

Sunnee Billingsley, Stockholm University

Multiple mechanisms potentially link social mobility and fertility behavior. The relationship between mobility and childbearing has recently become a subject of investigation once again now that large-scale longitudinal micro data allows us to observe the relationship more carefully. One advantage of new resources is the possibility to observe not just the individual influence of a man’s or woman’s mobility events on childbearing, but how these factors operate within a couple. Results of discrete time hazard analyses show that downward mobility has no influence on either second or third child conceptions for both men and women. Upward mobility, on the other hand is positively related to second conceptions for men. In contrast, both men and women have lower third birth risks when they have been upwardly mobile. The final analyses will show how these factors operate when viewed from a couple perspective.