There is an abundance of research on fertility dynamics for single European countries. However, there is a dearth of studies that cover a larger set of countries. Jonas Woods’ dissertation fills this research gap by providing a comprehensive overview on contemporary European fertility dynamics. It approaches the topic by using large-scale micro-level data from the Generations and Gender Survey (GGS), the European Social Survey (ESS) as well as additional survey data from the UK and Spain. As a method advanced event history modeling is applied. The main themes that are addressed are: (a) the educational gradient in fertility in Europe (b), the role of national unemployment and other macro-level factors in first and second birth transitions and (c) the relationship between parental leave uptake and fertility.
The book is based on a dissertation that was defended successfully at the University of Antwerp in January 2016. Each chapter of this book can be read as a stand-alone article. In my view, it is the chapter 2, which investigates the educational gradient in fertility, that provides the most detailed investigations. I particularly like that chapter, because it displays trends for single countries, by birth cohorts and education. This makes it possible to gauge the diverse dynamics that exists in Europe. The analysis presented here is sophisticated (including advanced frailty modeling), but at the same time accessible to the wider audience. There is also a clear policy message that follows from this chapter. There is no educational gradient for formerly socialist countries in first birth rates, but a very pronounced one in “familialistic regimes” such as Italy or Austria. In some countries, the educational gradient has changed over the cohorts, suggesting that the nexus is not fixed, but very sensitive to changes on the macro-level structure of the society.
Two chapters in this dissertation address the influence of the macro-level context for birth dynamics in more depth. Chapter 3 presents a study on first births which combines ESS data from more than twenty European countries with aggregate unemployment rates (and other macro-level indicators). Among other things, Jonas picks up here the classical demographic question of whether fertility develops pro- or counter-cyclically. He extends this question by exploring differential effects by age and female education. Chapter 4 on second births follows a similar strategy and combines contextual factors on the macro-level (such as national expenses for child allowances) with birth dynamics on the individual level. This chapter shows the author’s great ability to formulate careful hypotheses and conduct refined demographic analyses. At the same time, one must realize that the potential of the data, in particular of the ESS, to conduct fine-grained fertility analyses by business cycle or calendar year is severely constrained by the small sample sizes of the data.
Chapter 5 on parental leave regulations most immediately addresses the role of social policies in birth dynamics. What I particularly like here is that the paper seriously looks into uptake of policy measures. However, the investigation of such a topic is like a double-edged sword. While it is interesting and highly policy relevant to get an idea on the composition of the people who use a certain policy measure, it is difficult to make causal inference from the effect of a policy uptake on subsequent behavior. To tackle the selection of people into a social policy measure remains a challenge for this type of research.
Albeit that it is uncommon to comment on the Appendix in a book review, the Appendix of this book deserves special mentioning. It includes a detailed validation of the fertility data from the GGS which are extremely important. They are not only a great service to the academic community, but also show that the author pays great attention to the limits and potential of the data sets at hand.
All in all, Jonas Wood picks up a long-standing Dutch/Belgium tradition with his book and moves beyond the conventional national approaches to investigate the larger European fertility patterns and trends. He fully exploits the potential of the GGS for comparative fertility research. The comparative work emphasizes the potential that exists in this type of data, and it shows how important it is to continue the efforts to collaborate and collect comparative micro-level data sets at the European level. The analyses presented in this book are solid, thorough and deep investigations. The language is clear and well balanced. Apart from the wide audience of fertility and family researchers, I think that the book is a great role model for dissertation projects and I can only recommend it to upcoming PhD students in the field of quantitative family and fertility research. The work combines careful demographic analyses with a sound application of statistical methods. Causal analysis is a difficult task in demographic analysis, where real experiments are out of question for good ethical reasons. We need to rely on observational data, and this thesis shows how to best tackle selectivity and endogeneity issues by various means. The logical next steps are to continue that path and explore further options to tackle the causal impact of social policy reforms and economic uncertainty in fertility and family dynamics.