ArticleDemography2017
Is the Association Between Education and Fertility Postponement Causal? The Role of Family Background Factors.
Article in Demography, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Impact of Education on Fertility During the Chinese Reform Era (1980-2018): Changes Across Birth Cohorts and Interaction with Fertility Policies.European journal of population = Revue europeenne de demographie · 2024Article
- The Positive Effect of Women's Education on Fertility in Low-Fertility China.European journal of population = Revue europeenne de demographie · 2022Article
- Causal Impact of School Starting Age on the Tempo of Childbirths: Evidence from Working Mothers and School Entry Cutoff Using Exact Date of Birth.European journal of population = Revue europeenne de demographie · 2021Article
- Gender Discrimination and Excess Female Under-5 Mortality in India: A New Perspective Using Mixed-Sex Twins.Demography · 2020Article
- Using genetics for social science.Nature human behaviour · 2020Review
- How Does Birth Order and Number of Siblings Affect Fertility? A Within-Family Comparison Using Swedish Register Data.European journal of population = Revue europeenne de demographie · 2020Article
- Using Polygenic Scores in Social Science Research: Unraveling Childlessness.Frontiers in sociology · 2019Article
- Education, Smoking, and Cohort Change: Forwarding a Multidimensional Theory of the Environmental Moderation of Genetic Effects.American sociological review · 2018Article
- Rising Educational Participation and the Trend to Later Childbearing.Population and development review · 2017Article
- Hidden heritability due to heterogeneity across seven populations.Nature human behaviour · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
A large body of literature has demonstrated a positive relationship between education and age at first birth. However, this relationship may be partly spurious because of family background factors that cannot be controlled for in most research designs. We investigate the extent to which education is causally related to later age at first birth in a large sample of female twins from the United Kingdom (N = 2,752). We present novel estimates using within-identical twin and biometric models. Our findings show that one year of additional schooling is associated with about one-half year later age at first birth in ordinary least squares (OLS) models. This estimate reduced to only a 1.5-month later age at first birth for the within-identical twin model controlling for all shared family background factors (genetic and family environmental). Biometric analyses reveal that it is mainly influences of the family environment-not genetic factors-that cause spurious associations between education and age at first birth. Last, using data from the Office for National Statistics, we demonstrate that only 1.9 months of the 2.74 years of fertility postponement for birth cohorts 1944-1967 could be attributed to educational expansion based on these estimates. We conclude that the rise in educational attainment alone cannot explain differences in fertility timing between cohorts.
Indexed as
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.