Do Individuals from Wealthy Families Have More Children? Parental Wealth and Fertility in Europe

Giulia Corti , Centre for Demographic Studies (CED)
Diederik Boertien, Centre d’Estudis Demogràfics (CED)
Albert Esteve, Center for Demographic Studies (Barcelona)

Even though the relationship between education and fertility has been widely documented, few studies have looked at alternative markers of socioeconomic status (SES). In this paper, we look at parental wealth, a characteristic that might be less endogenous to fertility as compared to education, and that allows us to zoom in on the fertility behavior of economic elites. We ask the following research questions: Is parental wealth associated with the transition to childbearing and its timing? Is the association between children’s fertility and parental wealth different from that observed for parental income, parental education, and own education? Do associations vary between countries? To answer these questions, we use data from SHARE for 28 countries. SHARE collects information on wealth of individuals aged 50 and above, as well as information on the fertility behavior of any children they might have. This allows us to calculate the association between parental wealth and fertility for the SHARE respondents’ children. Preliminary results show generally small associations between parental wealth and fertility. Parental wealth is related to lower fertility in Southern Europe, but to higher fertility in Nordic countries, even though parental education was not (yet) related to fertility in those countries.

See extended abstract

 Presented in Session 90. Socio-economic Inequalities and Impacts