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  • Title: Age patterns of women at first birth.
    Author: Bloom DE.
    Journal: Genus; 1982; 38(3-4):101-28. PubMed ID: 12312900.
    Abstract:
    This paper investigates the age patterns of women at 1st birth using a marriage model which relates observed distributions of 1st marriage frequencies (FMFs) to a standard schedule where FMF is defined as the number of 1st marriages in an age interval divided by the number of women, regardless of marital status, in the interval. The data collected for the prupose of studying the fit of the marriage model to 1st birth distributions are from Finland and Italy for ages 15-49 from the years 1932-75. The 2nd application exploits the parametric nature of the model by using the fit of the model to incomplete 1st birth data to project the unobserved portion of the 1st birth distribution. The results provide evidence of increasing heterogeneity of women with regard to their age at 1st birth, no trend toward delayed childbearing, and a secular increase in the incidence of childlessness in 1/2 of the populations analyzed, with no trend in the other 1/2. Several directions for future research include: 1) a detailed examination of the fit of the marriage model to higher order birth frequency distributions will be worthwhile; 2) it might be useful to explore the extent to which the fit of the marriage model to 1st birth data can be used to infer the age of entry into cohabitation in different populations, which would prove especially interesting for populations in which marriage does not signal the onset of "fruitful cohabitation" for a substantial proportion of the population; 3) the marriage model might be extended by letting its parameters depend on covariates, which would permit analyses of the determinants of age at marriage and 1st birth to incorporate known empirical regularities characterizing the age distributions of these events; and 4) the period adjustment model would be extended by allowing the proportionate period effects to vary unrestrictively by age group.
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