Births, Marriages, and the Economic Environment in Greece: Empirical Evidence Over Time

Paraskevi Salamaliki

Journal of Family and Economic Issues, 2017, vol. 38, issue 2, No 4, 218-237

Abstract: Abstract This paper investigated the impact of the macroeconomic environment on family demographic outcomes in Greece at the macro level. We focused on the dynamic relationship between births, marriages, and economic indicators, using time-series data covering the period 1960–2014. Our empirical analysis was based on impulse response functions and forecast error variance decomposition in the framework of vector autoregressive (VAR) models. Our main results showed that birth rate and marriage rate positively responded to income and employment shocks, with the estimated responses being sizable, especially for the birth rate. Income effects and status-shifts effects (proxied by private consumption) influenced the birth rate and marriage rate in opposite ways. The unemployment rate produced strong negative effects on births, while marriage rate responses were substantially lower. Innovation accounting showed that a large proportion of the h-step forecast error variance of birth and marriage rate was accounted for by innovations (shocks) in the economic indicator variables for long-term horizons. The ongoing Greek economic crisis has contributed to the (negative) responses of births and marriages to income and employment shocks. Responses to the unemployment rate were still large when excluding the crisis years or when removing crisis effects on the series’ long-run component (trend).

Keywords: Birth rate; Marriage rate; Income; Unemployment rate; Employment; Impulse responses (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10834-016-9514-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:kap:jfamec:v:38:y:2017:i:2:d:10.1007_s10834-016-9514-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... es/journal/10834/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10834-016-9514-3

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Family and Economic Issues is currently edited by Joyce Serido

More articles in Journal of Family and Economic Issues from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().