infonet-economy

Not available in German. German unification led a drastic decline in the East German birth rate. Recent explanations of this phenomena point to the importance of an adjustment process of the East German pattern with often early births to the West German pattern with fairly late births. The paper presents an update on previous analyses of age specific birth rates, as well as a new microeconomic approach based on individual data. The empirical evidence presented in this paper supports the view that the sharp reduction in East German fertility is in fact part of an adjustment process towards West German fertility patterns. (doi:10.1023/A:1010792230291)