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

Abstract

This paper examines the usefulness of 1-sex and 2-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, the female models proved more useful than the male models. 2-sex models generally predict more variance than do female models. It was shown that the white wife's utility considerations dominate the predictions, with husband as a junior partner and partial 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 excluding an important component of the determinants of fertility.