Pre-Conference Workshop organised by Anna Baranowska-Rataj, Sandrine Metzger, Nadia Steiber, and Lili Vargha:
Comparative Family Research with Population Register Data
The workshop aims to bring together scholars working with, or interested in working with, population register data for family research. The goal is to exchange ideas, discuss data access and research infrastructures across countries, and foster comparative collaboration. Participants are invited to give a 3-minute flash presentation introducing ongoing or planned research using register data. Presenters are encouraged to bring a poster or flyer summarizing their project and briefly describing register data access in their country. The short presentations will be followed by time for discussion, networking, and developing new joint initiatives. Scholars from Austria, Netherlands and Sweden have already agreed to briefly present their projects.
Anna Baranowska-Rataj, Erika Sandow, Nadia Steiber:
The Varying Impact of Educational Hypogamy on the Transition to Parenthood
The reversal of the gender gap in education has reshaped partner formation and challenged traditional family patterns across Europe. As unions where women are more educated than their male partners become increasingly common, understanding their implications for family formation is essential for addressing new social and demographic realities. Research to date provides mixed evidence on how such educationally hypogamous unions influence fertility. This study investigates how the transition to parenthood unfolds across partnership duration in hypogamous versus homogamous unions. Using complete Austrian register data covering all partnerships formed in 2011 and followed through 2021 (N =26 252), we estimate discrete-time hazard models of first birth. By interacting union duration with educational pairing and applying multiprocess models to account for selectivity in both union formation and dissolution, we examine how the meaning of time within partnerships differs across educational configurations. Preliminary results challenge the notion of hypogamy as an initial mismatch that delays childbearing. Instead, hypogamous couples display higher first-birth risks during the early years of their union, with convergence and even reversal at later stages. Accounting for selectivity largely removes this early advantage, suggesting that family-oriented women may self-select into hypogamous unions to realise parenthood earlier. These findings highlight how shifting gender and educational structures interact with partnership dynamics to shape fertility behaviour in contemporary Europe, offering new insights into how populations adapt to changing social realities.
Shiwen Liu, Lili Vargha:
What Parents Say and What Parents Do: How Parental Attitudes and Behaviors Jointly Shape Youth Gender Role Attitudes in China
Gender role attitudes influence individuals’ decisions in both the labor market and household domain, and their intergenerational transmission is crucial for understanding persistent gender inequality in China. Using longitudinal data from the 2014 and 2020 waves of the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), this study examines how parental gender role attitudes and gendered behaviors, including maternal labor force participation and paternal involvement in housework, shape youths’ gender role attitudes in the Chinese context. The results show that both paternal and maternal attitudes have significant positive effects on youths’ gender role attitudes, with similar magnitudes. Maternal labor force participation also has an independent positive effect, while paternal involvement in housework does not. Interaction analyses reveal no significant gender heterogeneity between sons and daughters, nor complementary or cumulative effects between paternal and maternal attitudes. Maternal gender role attitudes and maternal labor force participation exhibit a clear cumulative effect, but no such interaction emerges between paternal attitudes and behaviors. These findings advance our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the intergenerational transmission of gender role attitudes in China.
Sandrine Metzger, Nadia Steiber, Anna Baranowska-Rataj, Laura Zilian:
The Social Gradient in Infant Health from a Couple-Level Perspective: Revisiting the Heterogamy Penalty Hypothesis
This study examines the consequences of educational assortative mating for infant health. Although the positive relationship between maternal education and infant health is well-established, less is known about the impact of both parents’ absolute and relative education. Yet, the heterogamy penalty hypothesis suggests that couples with dissimilar educational status face greater stressors than their homogamous counterparts, potentially resulting in unequal gestational outcomes between pairings. Using Austrian birth register data (N=455,191 singleton births; n=355,119 different-sex couples), we apply Diagonal Reference Models to disentangle the independent association of educational dissimilarity with infant health from each parent’s educational levels to test this assumption. Results indicate a pronounced couple-level educational gradient, with substantially better birth outcomes among higher-educated homogamous parents, as well as a relatively balanced contribution of maternal and paternal education in shaping infant health. While hypogamy shows no significant disadvantages for infant health, we find hypergamy to be associated with higher risks of excessive birth weight and atypical growth compared to homogamy. However, these heterogamy penalty patterns remain small when compared with the large couple-level gradient. Overall, this study provides new evidence on how parents’ educational pairing and combined resources are associated with neonatal health, highlighting a pathway linking couple-level characteristics to early-life health inequalities. The next step in this study is to determine whether these results reflect causal heterogamy effects or endogenous selection processes using an instrumental variable design that addresses non-random selection into heterogamous unions in Austria.
Nadia Steiber, Erich Striessnig, Laura Zilian:
Local Mating Markets and Partnership Formation: The Role of Education-Specific Mating Squeezes
The reversed gender gap in education has created structural constraints in local mating markets. The surplus of highly educated women relative to highly educated men limits their options for educationally homogamous partnerships. Previous research suggests that such education-specific mating squeezes contribute to shifting patterns of union formation, including rising proportions of hypogamous couples — where the woman has a higher level of education than the man. This study examines the impact of such constraints in local mating markets on partnership formation, i.e., the likelihood and timing of union formation and educational sorting. We extend previous research by using Austrian register data including all individuals born in 1991, who were single in 2011. Following them over ten years (about 85,000 persons) allows us to examine partnership formation from a life course perspective during a critical life phase for partnership formation. Consistent with previous findings, our results show that local education-specific mating squeezes increase the probability of hypogamous unions and that this effect increases with age. Our study extends these findings by incorporating interactions between age, market squeeze and market density and by testing differences in results across different definitions of local mating markets and squeeze indicators.
Erich Striessnig, Nadia Steiber, Ruslan Basyrov, Laura Zilian:
The Historical Evolution of the Education-Specific Mating Squeeze from a Sub-National Perspective
Austria, Germany, and Switzerland have repeatedly been found to lag behind in the shift towards growing educational hypogamy that has followed the reversal in the gender gap in education. Here we use four decades’ worth of Austrian census data to explore this phenomenon under a historical perspective at the sub-national level. We construct a municipality-specific mate-market measure based on travel times extracted from OpenStreetMap. For each of these mate-markets, we derive various indicators of the education-specific mating squeeze. Relating the squeeze values to different demographic and economic, municipality-level covariates, we find the squeeze to be driven predominantly by developments in Austria’s low-density areas, with the role of population density reversing over time. These sub-national variations still need to be explored further. Eventually, we hope to contribute to an improved understanding of educational assortative mating at the local, mate-market level.
Manuel Valdés, Nadia Steiber:
Do Daughters Gain from Hypogamy and Sons from Hypergamy? Parental Heterogamy and Children’s Educational Outcomes
Prior studies have abundantly documented the positive effect of parents’ absolute educational attainment on their children’s educational outcomes, but research on the impact of the relative dimension of parents’ education remains limited. In this study, we investigate whether women have an educational advantage when raised in hypogamous rather than hypergamous families, whether men experience a similar advantage when raised in hypergamous rather than hypogamous families, and whether these advantages vary with the prevalence of hypogamous families relative to hypergamous ones. To examine these questions, we use data from four waves of the European Union Statistics and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) survey, yielding a sample of 50,746 individuals residing in 30 European countries and born between 1956 and 1995. Our results show that women benefit substantially from being raised in hypogamous families, a positive effect that has not decreased as hypogamy became more prevalent relative to hypergamy. Men experience a similar advantage when raised in hypergamous families, but this effect has waned with the decline of hypergamy relative to hypogamy. Beyond contributing to research on the influence of parental educational mating pattern on children’s academic outcomes, our findings have relevant implications for the evolution of the gender gap in educational attainment.
Lili Vargha, Nadia Steiber, Rudolf Winter-Ebmer:
Fathers’ and Mothers’ Joint Longitudinal Earnings Trajectories before and after First Birth in Austria
This paper analyzes long-term earnings trajectories of Austrian first-time parents from a dyadic perspective, covering four years before and twenty-one years after the birth of their first child. Using Group-Based Multi-Trajectory Modeling (Nagin et al 2018) and longitudinal administrative data, we jointly model mothers’ and fathers’ typical earnings trajectories alongside parity progression. This joint approach captures the simultaneous development of both parents’ earnings, extending prior research that has largely focused on within-couple earnings inequality or mothers’ relative income shares, often neglecting absolute income levels. Our dataset includes all first births in Austria between 1990 and 1997 (N=160464), allowing a comprehensive analysis of within- and between-couple differences in earnings trajectories across the transition to parenthood. After identifying typical joint earnings trajectories, we examine how trajectory group membership varies by the couple’s socio-economic characteristics, particularly the educational constellation of the parents. Results show that when the mother is more educated, couples have a higher probability of becoming dual earners more rapidly. In contrast, when the father is more educated, couples are more likely to experience a more gradual return to dual earning or maintain a stable male-breadwinner pattern. Couples in which both partners have tertiary education follow less specialized earnings patterns than less-educated homogamous couples. While primarily exploratory, our study provides new insights into the development of income inequalities within and between couples after childbirth, highlighting how absolute and relative resources shape parental earnings trajectories from a dynamic couple perspective.
Flora Zhou, Max Reichert, Lili Vargha:
From Partners to Parents: Pre-Birth Income Inequalities and the Evolution of Maternal Absolute and Relative Income Trajectories after Childbirth
This study analyzes the absolute and relative income trajectories of Dutch first-time mothers over a 12-year period, from two years before to ten years after their first childbirth, using an intra-household bargaining framework. Using Group-Based Multi-Trajectory Modelling (GBMTM), the study aims to identify distinct groups based on the trajectories of mothers' absolute income, their relative contribution to total household income, and patterns of subsequent births. By jointly analyzing these dimensions, the study tests how mothers' household bargaining power in the two years before pregnancy is associated with the evolution of her bargaining power over ten years post-birth. The dataset comprises all first births in the Netherlands in 2013 using register data, with annual measurements of maternal absolute income and their share of total household income. The study contributes to the literature in two key aspects: first, it provides a typology of trajectories of absolute and relative maternal income within a household context over 10 years after first childbirth. Second, it explicitly tests the association between these typical trajectories and pre-pregnancy income dynamics. We identify 8 distinct trajectories, ranging from 'Lowest income with growing dependency' (characterized by high dependency and multiple births) to 'High-Income Autonomous Breadwinners' (with strong income growth and high autonomy). Pre-pregnancy income dynamics, such as absolute levels and slopes as well as the age of the mother strongly predict group membership, with higher pre-pregnancy bargaining power and older age associated with more autonomous post-birth trajectories.
