The negative educational gradients in Romanian fertility

In Western countries, rates of second and third births typically increase with educational attainment, a feature that usually disappears if unobserved heterogeneity is brought into the event-history analysis. By contrast, second and third birth rates decline as one moves across groups with increasing education in a country like Romania, and the decline becomes greater if one adds unobserved heterogeneity in the analysis. The present paper demonstrates this and shows that the feature is retained in the presence of control variables like age at first birth, period effects, and others.