Selectivity in Higher-Order Childbearing in Sweden

Authors

• Gunnar Andersson

DOI: https://doi.org/10.23979/fypr.45033

Keywords:

childbearing, Sweden

Abstract

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.