The negligible influence of premarital cohabitation on marital fertility in current danish cohorts, 1975

This paper studies the influence of premarital cohabitation on marital fertility by applying life table methods to data for cohorts of Danish women born in 1926–1955, collected in retrospective interviews made in 1975. For each five-year cohort, the data have been analyzed by duration of marriage or by duration since previous birth, for women who had no reported births before marriage. Our main empirical results are: (a) that women who married at age 15–19 had higher rates of marital first and second births than those married at ages 20–24, and (b) that premarital cohabitation had very little influence on births of these two first orders in our data.