Education and Fertility: A comparative Micro-econometric Analysis in Europe

In this paper we investigate the relationship between education and completed fertility decisions at couple level for some EU countries. For this purpose we control for demographic, social and economic conditions, by using the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) dataset. In order to handle the endogeneity issue in fertility decisions, we use the Linear Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) method, where female’s education is instrumented by her partner’s education. The contribution to the literature is to investigate the extent to which the effect of education on fertility may be intensified by the postponement and the career effects.