Wealth and childbearing: fertility by parity according to own and parental wealth in Swedish administrative taxation data

Abstract The relationship between wealth and fertility has rarely been studied in high-income societies in contrast to other dimensions of socioeconomic status. This study provides novel evidence of an association between wealth and fertility in contemporary Sweden by examining administrative taxation data for all Swedish men and women born in 1940 and 1960. The study considers both personal wealth and parental wealth and examines differences by parity and across the wealth distribution. I present descriptive results and regression models in which the association between wealth and fertility is assessed net of accumulated income, education, and civil status. The relationship between wealth and fertility in Sweden is relatively modest and in most cases negative, with little difference in average fertility between the very wealthy and those with no wealth. The associations are similar for men and women but are more negative for women and attenuate in the later cohort. The largest differences are found when examining average wealth by parity. Childless women, and to a lesser extent men, have greater wealth than those with children.