Fertility and socioeconomic gender equality between a couple – A Bayesian analysis Seminar

Connections between couples’ socioeconomic status and fertility have recently attracted noticeable attention, especially in the context of ongoing changes of the gender roles and a growing variety of family models. Although gender differences have been examined quite deeply, couples’ procreative behaviour treated as a mutual result of male and female socioeconomic characteristics remains under-researched. Previous studies have suggested that the proper inference about procreative behaviour of a couple should be performed not only by analysing the characteristics of both partners, but also by considering at the same time the childless population, as well as the population of parents. Therefore, the aim of this study is to investigate couples’ procreative behaviour with regard to the gender socioeconomic (in)equality between partners, taking into account that the behavioural drivers could differ among parents and childless couples. The Bayesian Zero-Inflated Poisson framework, which allows considering two states (childlessness and parenthood) within one statistical model, is applied. The empirical illustration is based on the Generations and Gender Survey (GGS) dataset.