Fertility and the Changing Female Educational Attainment in Croatia

This paper investigates the aggregate relationship between cohort fertility and female educational attainment in Croatia. Numerous demographic studies have examined the link between fertility and the level of education. However, newer research indicates that the field of education might also play a role when trying to explain fertility behavior. We contribute to existing literature on macro-level factors related to reproductive outcomes by considering both the level and field of education as possible sources of cohort fertility differentials. The main goal of the present study is to assess the effect of structural changes in educational attainment on cohort fertility decline by means of demographic decomposition techniques. Our analysis is based on detailed 2011 Census data, which provide information on the number of livebirths by mother’s year of birth, birth order, marital status and educational attainment (i.e. the level and field of education). The results of our decomposition analyses reveal the dominance of the structural effect in explaining the overall completed fertility decline in Croatia. We assumed that the changing distribution of women by field of education at least partially accounts for the observed patterns in completed fertility but found no strong evidence in support of the outlined hypothesis.