Boulier B, Rosenzweig M R
Demography. 1978 Nov;15(4):487-97.
To influence the number of children ever born to a woman, socioeconomic variables must operate through behavioral and biological mechanisms such as the age at marriage, the level of fertility in the absence of deliberate fertility control, and the level of control exerted to reduce fertility within marriage. In this paper, we propose a new measure of cumulative fertility which is standardized for the age-fecundity relationship and for exposure to the risk of conception associated with duration of marriage. A simple model of fertility behavior which incorporates some of the mechanisms through which socioeconomic factors may affect fertility is developed and applied to data from the United States to demonstrate the properties of alternative measures of family size. The results indicate that use of the new measure allows more precise estimates of socioeconomic fertility relationships than would be obtained with children ever born or by sample stratification.
要影响一名女性的终身生育子女数，社会经济变量必须通过行为和生物学机制发挥作用，如结婚年龄、在没有刻意控制生育的情况下的生育水平，以及在婚姻内为降低生育率而实施的控制程度。在本文中，我们提出了一种新的累积生育率衡量指标，该指标针对年龄与生育力的关系以及与婚姻持续时间相关的受孕风险暴露进行了标准化处理。我们构建了一个简单的生育行为模型，该模型纳入了社会经济因素可能影响生育的一些机制，并将其应用于美国的数据，以展示家庭规模替代衡量指标的特性。结果表明，与使用终身生育子女数或通过样本分层相比，使用新的衡量指标能够更精确地估计社会经济与生育之间的关系。
