Gerrit Bauer, Marita Jacob
The influence of partners’ education on family formation

EQUALSOC Working Paper
2009/4 S.
,
Network of Excellence Economic Change, Quality of Life & Social Cohesion (EQUALSOC)
,
2009

Most of the empirical studies on education and fertility focus on characteristics of the female spouse. The role of the partner is often neglected. Yet, most children are fathered and grow up in a relationship. Hence, we assume that both partners’ education has to be regarded when analysing family formation. In our paper, we use couples as the unit of analyses and look at each partner’s education and the couple’s educational constellation, i.e. if both partners have the same educational level or if one partner is higher educated than the other. In our empirical analysis on first births we us the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP).