The Rise in the Parental Absolute Age Diference and the Fertility Outcomes in Spain

J. Sebastian Ruiz-Santacruz , Spatial National Research Council - Center for Human and Social Sciences
Francisco Viciana, Institute of Statistics and Cartography of Andalusia
Stanislao Mazzoni, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)
Diego Ramiro Fariñas , Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)

Despite the fact that some authors have described the behaviors and the relationship between age at first marriage (Esteve, Cortina and Cabré, 2009; Kolk, 2015) and the possible outcomes in fertility (Eurostat, 2018; Rotering and Bras, 2019), little is known about the age differences of the parents at the time of their children’s birth (Dudel, Cheng, and Klüsener ,2020). Moreover, in spite of observing that hypergamy by age has remained stable, with a moderate but constant decrease for marriages in the European case it has been observed that, for the Spanish case, the absolute difference between fathers and mothers at birth has been increasing. This work aims to account for the increase in age and the possible impact it has on Spanish fertility, detailing through the creation of a counter-factual based on the technique proposed by Stoeckel and Chowdhury (1984), the percentage of children generated in the case in which the difference is less. Preliminary results show the curves by the mother’s and father’s age from 1975 to 2019 at the time of the children’s birth, focusing on the first kid, to give a percentage of increase in births with the established assumption. What is expected is to be able to obtain the number of missing births and to correlate those increases with the rise in age difference, in order to add knowledge about the trend towards low fertility in the Spanish and the European population.

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 Presented in Session P1. Postercafe