Residential context, migration and fertility in a modern urban society
Abstract
This study examines fertility variation by residential context in Britain. While there is a large literature on fertility trends and determinants in industrialised countries, to date longitudinal research on spatial fertility variation has been restricted to the Nordic countries. We study fertility variation across regions of different sizes, and within urban regions by distinguishing between central cities and suburbs. We use vital statistics and longitudinal data and apply event history analysis. We investigate the extent to which the socio-economic characteristics of couples and selective migrations explain fertility variation between residential contexts, and the extent to which contextual factors potentially play a role. Our analysis shows that fertility levels decline as the size of an urban area increases; within urban regions suburbs have significantly higher fertility levels than city centres. Differences in fertility by residential context persist when we control for the effect of population composition and selective migrations.
Citation
Kulu , H & Washbrook , E 2014 , ' Residential context, migration and fertility in a modern urban society ' , Advances in Life Course Research , vol. 21 , pp. 168-182 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.alcr.2014.01.001
Publication
Advances in Life Course Research
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1569-4909Type
Journal article
Rights
© 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
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