Wives’ and husbands’ expected costs and benefits of childbearing as predictors of pregnancy

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Abstract
This paper examines the usefulness of one‐sex and two‐sex utility models of reproductive behavior in predicting births as consequences of wives’ and husbands’ perceptions of the costs and benefits of another child. We used longitudinal data on a sample of 280 white and 69 black young urban American couples. For whites, female models are mostly better than male models. Two‐sex models generally predict more variance than female models. We show that the white wife's utility considerations dominate the predictions, with husband as a junior partner and partial redundancy of female and male models. The utility considerations of black husbands dominate the predictions, with wives as junior partners and no redundancy in female and male models. We conclude that neither sex incorporates completely the spouse's utility considerations into its own utility structure. Because some male models are surprisingly strong, researchers cannot omit males without running the risk of leaving out an important component of the determinants of fertility.

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