Delayed Childbearing and Childlessness Choice or Chance

描述（由申请人提供）：人们通常认为，延迟生育使许多妇女面临意外无子女的风险，但确定延迟如何影响完成生育是复杂的，因为延迟的很大一部分可归因于选择：男性和女性对何时以及多久生孩子做出有目的和深思熟虑的决定。然而，意外事件-意料之外或个人无法控制的事件-也可能导致不希望的生育延迟，低于希望的完整家庭规模，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无子女方面各自作用的第一步。利用全国青年纵向调查（NLSY 79），这项研究将利用过早终止妊娠的数据制定潜在生育力的衡量标准;通过制定和估计第一胎和随后生育间隔时间的风险模型，描述推迟生育的人，该模型是工资、收入、教育、生育力、婚姻冲击和人口特征的函数;并评估推迟生育和无子女与预期一致的程度。

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.