Symmetry in human male faces may be a cue to heritable fitness benefits and is found attractive. Preferences for facial masculinity, another proposed marker of genetic quality, have been found to vary in ways that may maximise evolutionary relevant benefits and masculinity is found to be of increased attractiveness at peak fertility across the menstrual cycle. Here we show that women prefer mor...

INTRODUCTION Despite a relatively strong family planning program and regionally modest levels of fertility, Ghana recorded one of the highest levels of unmet need for family planning on the African continent in 2008. Unmet need for family planning is a composite measure based on apparent contradictions between women's reproductive preferences and practices. Women who want to space or limit birt...

The existing literature on marriage and fertility decisions pays little attention to the roles played by risk preferences and uncertainty. However given uncertainty regarding the availability of suitable marriage partners, the ability to contracept, and the ability to conceive, women's risk preferences might be expected to play an important role in marriage and fertility timing decisions. By us...

BACKGROUND Unmet need for family planning points to the gap between women's reproductive desire to avoid pregnancy and contraceptive behaviour. An estimated 222 million women in low- and middle-income countries have unmet need for modern contraception. Despite its prevalence, there has been little rigorous research during the past fifteen years on reasons for this widespread failure to implemen...

Fertility preferences are an essential component of family planning program evaluation; however, doubts about their validity in sub-Saharan Africa exist and little methodological assessment has been carried out. This study investigates prospective fertility intentions in terms of their temporal stability, intensity, degree of spousal agreement, and association with future childbearing in northe...

This study tests the hypothesis that, in Nepal, measures of ideal family size mask an underlying preference for sons, making some people willing to have families larger than their ideal. Existing evidence suggests that men are likely to have stronger preferences for sons than are women. This research uses empirical evidence to examine the hypothesis that husbands are more willing than their wiv...

Cultural variables in economic analysis have recently experienced a strong renewal. This evolution sheds a new light on the old debate between the "Beckerian Model" of fertility and the "Synthesis Model" of fertility. In this paper, I propose a fertility model making the long run evolution of culture endogenous. The whole population is divided into two alternative cultures corresponding to spec...

Demographers and sociologists have studied why women remain childless for more than two decades; however, this specific choice of zero fertility has not interested economists. Permanent childlessness, in developed countries, can concern up to 30 % of the women in a cohort. Childlessness rates can be positively related to average fertility for some cohorts of women. This paper provides an explan...

Gender preferences may have substantial implications for a couple’s fertility behavior. However, there is only limited empirical research investigating this subject in modern Western societies. In this paper, data from the Fertility and Family Surveys are used to compare 17 European countries with respect to their gender preferences for children. Despite substantial regional heterogeneity acros...