Fatherhood and Fertility

Abstract

This paper demonstrates that education influences men’s childbearing behaviour in multiple ways. Focusing particularly on childlessness and multipartner fertility, key elements in our analyses are factors related to a man’s capacity for economic and practical parenting, reflected e.g. through income prospects, job-security, job-flexibility and the gender-composition of the job. Our data covers all men living in Norway during 1970-2006 which allows for a detailed analysis of diversity along a wide range of different educational groups and cohorts. Childlessness among men is most pronounced among those with low education and least pronounced among those with high education, but at a given educational level, we also observe sharp contrasts between men within different fields of education. The educational pattern of multi-partner fertility is different from childlessness, as the propensity to have children with more than one woman is most pronounced among those with low education.