The economic stress hypothesis (ESH) suggests that economic decline leads to a decrease in the proportion of males born in a population. A multitude of additional influences on sex ratios that often cannot be accounted for empirically make assessing the validity of the ESH difficult. Thus, as a...

Der Artikel untersucht die Bedeutung regionaler Einflussfaktoren auf der Kreisebene für den Prozess der Familiengründung westdeutscher Frauen in den 1980er und 1990er Jahren. Als theoretischer Rahmen wird ein Mehrebenenmodell soziologischer Erklärung vorgeschlagen. Die empirische Analyse des...

In this paper, a multilevel approach is used to investigate whether and how regional social contexts influence first and second birth probabilities of women living in western Germany during the 1980s and 1990s. In the theoretical part it is argued that regional opportunity structures as well as...