Migration and fertility

Ben Wilson, University of Stockholm and Wendy Sigle-Rushton and Jouni Kuha, London School of Economics and Political Science

(Project no. 0301358, previously 30135)

The primary purpose of this project is to examine differences in the fertility experiences of foreign- and native-born women in England and Wales. We will use information on the migration experiences of women and their parents and hope to estimate, where possible, age at migration. We are also interested in sub-group heterogeneity by ethnicity and religion. Although not a primary focus of the analysis, other variables will be used to control for social, demographic and economic differences across the two groups.

The project will make use of census data on the country of birth of both respondents and respondent's parents (and in some cases grandparents), and link this information with births to respondents. (Parents of respondents who are resident in the same household in 1971 may have provided their own parent's country of birth allowing the analysis of grandparent country of birth for some of the sample who go on to give birth after 1971.) Indicators of migration and fertility will be created in order to compare the histories of different groups of women, and cross-sectional and longitudinal methods will be applied ot the micro-data. Deaths and embarkation data will be used to identify censored observations.