Out-of-partnership births in East and West Germany: Single women in East Germany are significantly more likely to give birth to a child than single women in West Germany, partly predating 1945

Out-of-partnership births in East and West Germany. Uwe Jirjahn & Cornelia Chadi. Review of Economics of the Household volume 18, pages853–881(2020). https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11150-019-09463-0

Abstract: Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we show that single women in East Germany are significantly more likely to give birth to a child than single women in West Germany. This applies to both planned and unplanned births. Our analysis provides no evidence that the difference between East and West Germany can be explained by economic factors or the higher availability of child care in East Germany. This suggests that the difference in out-of-partnership births is rather driven by behavioral and cultural differences. However, these behavioral and cultural differences do not only reflect different gender role models that evolved under the former communist regime in East Germany and the democratic one in West Germany. Partly, they also reflect a long historical divide that predates the 1945 separation of Germany.

Notes

1. 1.
   A further reason for building up the comprehensive child care system was that the communist regime tried to control the socialization and education of its citizens from the very start of their lives.
2. 2.
   Giavazzi et al. (2019) show that a process of cultural transmission can indeed take a long time. They examine the speed of evolution of a series of cultural attitudes for different generations of European immigrants to the US. Specifically, they identify family and moral values, general political views, and religious values as being relatively persistent.
3. 3.
   See www.destatis.de/DE/ZahlenFakten/Indikatoren/LangeReihen/Arbeitsmarkt/lrarb001.html.
4. 4.
   See www.destatis.de/DE/ZahlenFakten/GesamtwirtschaftUmwelt/VerdiensteArbeitskosten/VerdiensteVerdienstunterschiede/Tabellen/Bruttomonatsverdienste.html.
5. 5.
   Note that the data provide no information whether women younger than 18 years gave birth to a child.
6. 6.
   While the estimated coefficient on East Germany is slightly smaller in regression (2) than in regression (1), the marginal effect is higher. The nonlinearity of the probit model implies that the marginal effect of a variable not only depends on the coefficient of that variable, but also on the other explanatory variables included in the regression.
7. 7.
   A potential limitation of our dependent variable is that the share of women with a planned out-of-partnership birth is low. This might result in greater randomness and, hence, in insignificant coefficients of the variables for child care availability and risk attitude in the equation for planned births. However, these variables even take negative coefficients in that equation indicating that they may indeed have no positive influence on planned births.
8. 8.
   At the same time, more equal gender roles imply that cohabitation is more prevalent among East than among West Germans (Jirjahn and Struewing 2018). More emancipated women who are less dependent on a partner may be less inclined to safeguard a relationship through marriage. Moreover, as stressed by sociologists, cohabitation involves a greater lack of normative prescriptions for role performance (Baxter 2001). This leaves more space for cohabiting couples to negotiate more egalitarian relationships.
9. 9.
   We only provide coefficients as STATA has no canned command to calculate marginal effects for Firth’s model.
10. 10.
    E.g., see Brady and Burroway (2012); Corak et al. (2008); Krein and Beller (1988); Lerman (1996); Lichter and Graefe (1999); McLanahan and Sandefur (1994), and Scharte and Bolte (2012).
11. 11.
    E.g., see Maldonado and Nieuwenhuis (2015) and Pong et al. (2003).