Transmission of Fertility Pattern in Mother-Daughter Relation – Bayesian view (a case study of Austria)

The connection between fertility of parents and their children has been investigated many times over the past century. It seems to be insignificant among pre-transitional populations, but becomes more important over time, especially in developed countries. Following Pearson’s example, it was widely adopted to use simple correlation analyses in such studies. In this study we will present how to use more advanced statistical models and methods to determine the occurrence and strength of examined relationships. Thus, we aim to investigate the intergenerational transmission of fertility in contemporary populations (in the case of the motherdaughter relation in Austria) using the zero-inflated Poisson regression model. Using this model in fertility analysis allows us to treat childlessness as a qualitatively different state with possibly different determinants than parenthood (regardless of the number of children). Bayesian inference in this study enables us to obtain covariates’ distributions as well as distributions of covariates’ nonlinear functions (including their uncertainty) and allows us to incorporate our prior knowledge.