Sweden

Since 2010, fertility levels have declined unexpectedly in all Nordic countries, with record lows being reached in recent years. The reasons for these declines are unclear, except that fewer people are becoming parents. The aim of this study was to investigate whether changes in housing tenure played a role in the declined entry into parenthood. We expected that changes in housing tenure, particularly a decline in homeownership related to housing affordability challenges among young adults, may have contributed to this decline. Using harmonized Nordic individual-level register data, we assessed to what extent changes in housing tenure, changes in fertility behavior within tenure groups, or both, contributed to the decline. Discrete-time event history models and multivariate decomposition were applied. According to our results, homeownership among young adults declined in the 2010s in Denmark and Finland – but not in Sweden or Norway. The decline in first births was only partially attributable to compositional change in housing tenure along with other socioeconomic factors in Denmark, Finland and Sweden. Entry into parenthood declined among women, regardless of their tenure status, in all four countries during the 2010s, suggesting the importance of behavioral changes. However, the decline was more pronounced among renters than homeowners.

This study examines the persistence of fertility-related health problems across generations within the same family, and the utilization of assisted reproductive technologies (ART). Using comprehensive Swedish registry data, we document significant intergenerational transmission of fertility difficulties for both daughters and sons, independent of parental socioeconomic status. Daughters whose parents reported such problems are 2.6 percentage points, or 19.4 percent, more likely to experience fertility problems themselves. Sons whose parents reported fertility difficulties experience a 1.7 percentage point, or 13.5 percent, increase. These associations persist across alternative measures and samples. Comparing biological and adopted children raised in the same households, we find that this phenomenon is unlikely to be driven by family awareness of fertility issues, pointing to biological and other factors that biological children share with their parents but adopted children do not. Medical technology works equally well for those who use it, and we find no significant association between the success of advanced fertility treatments and parental backgrounds. However, past generations’ fertility difficulties are associated both with higher medical expenses and with social costs such as increased likelihood of divorce.

Estimating kinship networks is a data-intensive undertaking, usually conducted using empirical sources or demographic models. Although empirical data, such as population registers, provide observed individual-level information, they are limited by availability, truncation, and survivorship bias. Demographic models, including microsimulation, require less detailed data, but they often minimally account for population heterogeneity, family similarity, and multi-partner fertility. This study examines the agreement of kin counts (from grandparents to grandchildren) between SOCSIM microsimulation outputs and Swedish population registers for cohorts born between 1915 and 2017. The results show that microsimulation closely approximates mean kin numbers and reasonably reflects parity distributions. Microsimulation underestimates kin for recent cohorts not affected by truncation but provides a more accurate representation of kin for earlier cohorts with missing parent-child links. These findings highlight the utility of microsimulation for reconstructing kinship when only population-level rates are available, supporting its application in kinship analyses, both historical and projected.

Abstract The Nordic countries of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland were among the first countries to acknowledge same‐sex couples’ partnership and parenthood rights in their legislation. We explore trends over time in the share of female same‐sex and different‐sex couples that have children following their legal union and variation by socioeconomic status. Using harmonized register data, we assess couples’ likelihood of having a child over time, with a focus on education and income. We find strong increases in female couples’ likelihood of having a child, resulting in a sharply increasing prevalence, approaching near parity with different‐sex couples in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway around 2010. Finland diverges from the other countries in terms of its later and less steep increase. Higher education is associated with a higher likelihood of having a child, whereas we find a less clear gradient by income level. The results suggest that legal changes, together with more supportive wider cultural and normative societal environments, have made same‐sex parenthood more achievable in the Nordic countries. These changes are concurrent with the observed increase in parenthood. Following this increase, female couples today are nearly as likely as different‐sex couples to have children within a legal union.