Does fertility behavior spread among friends?

Nicoletta Balbo and Nicola Barban (n.barban@unibo.it)

No 50, Working Papers from "Carlo F. Dondena" Centre for Research on Social Dynamics (DONDENA), Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi

Abstract: This paper investigates how social interactions among friends shape fertility. We specifically examine whether and how friendsí fertility behaviour affects an individualís transition to parenthood. By integrating insights from economic and sociological theories, we elaborate on the mechanisms via which interactions among friends might affect an individualís risk of becoming a parent. By exploiting the survey design of the Add Health data, we follow a strategy that allows us to properly identify interaction effects and distinguish them from selection and contextual effects. We engage in a series of discrete time event history models with random effect at the dyadic level. Results show that, net of confounding effects, a friendís childbearing increases an individualís risk of becoming a parent. We find a short-term, curvilinear effect: an individualís risk of childbearing starts increasing after a friendís childbearing, it reaches its peak around two years later, and then decreases.

Keywords: transition to parenthood; add-health; social interaction; peer effect (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2012-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-evo and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

Downloads: (external link)
ftp://ftp.dondena.unibocconi.it/WorkingPapers/Dondena_WP050.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Failed to connect to FTP server ftp.dondena.unibocconi.it: No such host is known.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:don:donwpa:050

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.dondena.unibocconi.it/wp/
dondena.papers@unibocconi.it

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from "Carlo F. Dondena" Centre for Research on Social Dynamics (DONDENA), Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi via Rontgen, 1 - 20136 Milano.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Amy Johnson (amy.johnson@unibocconi.it this e-mail address is bad, please contact repec@repec.org).