Delayed Childbrearing and Childlessness Choice or Chance

描述（由申请人提供）：人们普遍认为，延迟生育使许多妇女面临意外生育的风险，但确定延迟如何影响完全生育是复杂的，因为延迟的很大一部分可归因于选择：男人和女人对何时生孩子和多久生一次孩子做出有目的和深思熟虑的决定。然而，偶然事件——没有预料到的或个人无法控制的——也可能导致不希望的生育延迟，低于期望的完整家庭规模，甚至不希望的无子女。这里提出的研究是评估选择和机会在决定推迟生育和不生育方面各自作用的第一步。利用全国青年纵向调查（NLSY79），本研究将利用过早终止妊娠的数据制定潜在生育能力的措施；通过建立和估计首次生育时间和随后生育间隔的风险模型，描述哪些人延迟生育，并将其作为工资、收入、教育、生育能力、婚姻冲击和人口特征的函数；并评估延迟生育和无子女在多大程度上符合预期。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): It is commonly argued that delayed childbearing puts many women at risk of unintended childlessness, but determining how delay affects completed fertility is complicated by the fact that a large component of delay is attributable to choice: men and women make purposeful and deliberate decisions about when and how often to have children. However, it is also true that chance events--unanticipated or outside the control of the individual--may lead to undesired delay in childbearing, lower than desired completed family size, and even undesired childlessness. The research proposed here is a first step in assessing the respective roles of choice and chance in the determination of delayed childbearing and childlessness. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), this research will develop measures of underlying fecundity using data on prematurely terminated pregnancies; describe who delays childbearing by developing and estimating hazard models of time to first birth and subsequent birth intervals as a function of wages, income, education, fecundity, marital shocks, and demographic characteristics; and assess the extent to which delayed childbearing and childlessness is consistent with expectations.