Trends in Childlessness among Less Educated and Minority Women in the United States

Steven P. Martin, University of Maryland

This paper is a methodological exercise that borrows an existing, straightforward fertility projection technique used by Rindfuss, Swicegood, and Morgan (1988) and improves it by incorporating competing risks for first birth and marriage transitions. In other words, I will estimate competing hazard models for first marriage and nonmarital first births, as well as models for marital first births and disruptions of childless marriages, then use age-specific hazard rates to reconstruct the proportion of women remaining childless to age 45, for different education and racial groups. The data source will be the marriage and fertility histories in the 2001 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), supported by data from marriage and fertility histories in June Current Population Surveys for 1990 and 1995.