Open AccessSelectivity in Higher-Order Childbearing in Sweden
Author(s) -
Gunnar Andersson
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
finnish yearbook of population research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1796-6191
pISSN - 1796-6183
DOI - 10.23979/fypr.45033
Subject(s) - parity (physics) , birth order , propensity score matching , demography , selection (genetic algorithm) , birth rate , population , fertility , statistics , mathematics , computer science , sociology , physics , particle physics , artificial intelligence
In this note, we present relative risks of giving birth for mothers with different numbers of children. We use Swedish register data and study the propensity to continue the childbearing beyond child number two. We pay special attention to births of those higher orders that are studied only rarely in conventional demographic analyses. As the parity increases to higher numbers, we expect to ? nd some kind of selection so that the group of mothers increasingly consists of very birth prone women. For births after a fourth child, we indeed ? nd such an effect in that the relative risk of giving birth to an additional child then increases with the birth order. In our intensity-regression models, we also check whether this selection effect of increasing birth risks can be picked up by the inclusion of a speci? c factor for unobserved heterogeneity in the mothers propensity to give birth. We ? nd that the positive gradient in the propensity to give birth indeed disappears when such a factor is included into our model.