The impact of education on third births. A multilevel discrete-time hazard analysis

Abstract

We propose to use multilevel discrete-time hazard models to assess the impact of societal and individual level covariates on the timing and occurrence of third births. We focus mainly on the impact of educational attainment on third births across 15 European countries. From the analysis in this paper, the effect of education on the propensity to have a third child is found to be negative. This education effect is not significantly weakened by the Nordic countries, but living in Scandinavia does increase the hazard for a third birth.

Keywords:

• Multilevel analysis
• discrete-time hazard analysis
• multilevel hazard analysis
• life course events

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a FWO grant Bijzondere doctoraatsbeurs 2002-2003. Part of this research was conducted at CBGS Brussels. We are grateful to many people from who we obtained interesting ideas and comments. Special thanks go to Professor Robert Cliquet (former head of the CBGS, Brussels) as one of the founding fathers of the FFS survey, Professor Jan Hoem (Max Planck Institute, Rostock) for his inspiration on third birth analysis and the PAU (Geneva) for making available the FFS standard recode files.