The Impact of Recohabitation on Fertility: Evidence from Life History Data in the Netherlands
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Several studies have examined the impact of earlier children on fertility decisions in second unions. These studies are guided by two hypotheses: the parenthood hypothesis, which argues that people want to have children to become a parent, and the commitment hypothesis, which argues that people want to have children to confirm the union. Because people often enter a second union while already having a prior child, recohabitation— which refers here to both unmarried and married new unions—is an ideal case for testing these hypotheses. Using data from the survey Divorce in The Netherlands, we test the validity of these two hypotheses. In addition, we extend comparisons from second unions to first marriages and we develop hypotheses about the effect of divorce on subsequent fertility. The findings support the argument that attaining parenthood in recohabitation is more important than having a child to cement the new union. Women who are recohabiting with a prior child are less likely of having a first birth in the new union than women who are recohabiting without a prior child. This applies less clearly to men and effects differ depending on the number, age, and residence status of the children. We also find evidence for our hypothesis about the effect of divorce. More specifically, recohabiting women without a child are more likely to have a child than first married women. For men, no such effect could be found. Our interpretation is that recohabiting women are catching up missed fertility opportunities in their first marriage, even though their total fertility remains lower as a result of age restrictions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".