The increasingly central role of vertical family kinship in Western societies underscores the potential value of intergenerational linkages that tie grandparents to the fertility of their adult children. Recent research has examined the changing demography of grandparenthood and the roles fulfilled by living grandparents, but the complex implications of grandparental death-a key feature of intergenerational linkages over the life course-have drawn less attention. In this article, we explore whether and how childbearing of adult women is affected by the death of grandparents-their own parent(s) or their spouse's parent(s). We develop a novel conceptual framework that presents the pathways of influence and considers the overall impact of grandparental death on childbearing of adult children. We then estimate fixed-effects models to identify causal relationships between grandparental death and childbearing, using linked micro-level census and population register data from Israel for the period 1986-2014. We find that grandparental death leads to a reduction of approximately 5 percentage points in the five-year probability of childbirth. The effects of grandparental death are negative across all parities examined and are broadly similar across grandparent's gender and kinship relation. Additional effects are identified, including how the impact of grandparental death varies with time since the previous birth as well as residential proximity prior to death. We explain how our findings regarding the effect of grandparental death offer insight into the role of living grandparents. Our results suggest that policy-makers concerned with low fertility should explore mechanisms that reinforce potential sources of support from grandparents.

中文翻译：

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祖父母死亡对成年子女生育能力的影响。

垂直家庭亲属关系在西方社会中日益重要的作用凸显了将祖父母与其成年子女的生育能力联系起来的代际联系的潜在价值。最近的研究考察了祖父母人口结构的变化以及在世的祖父母所扮演的角色，但祖父母死亡的复杂影响——生命历程中代际联系的一个关键特征——却很少受到关注。在这篇文章中，我们探讨了成年女性的生育是否以及如何受到祖父母（她们自己的父母或配偶的父母）死亡的影响。我们开发了一个新颖的概念框架，该框架展示了影响途径，并考虑了祖父母死亡对成年子女生育的总体影响。然后，我们使用以色列 1986 年至 2014 年期间关联的微观人口普查和人口登记数据，估计固定效应模型以确定祖父母死亡与生育之间的因果关系。我们发现，祖父母死亡导致五年内分娩概率降低约 5 个百分点。祖父母死亡的影响在所有被检查的胎次中都是负面的，并且在祖父母的性别和亲属关系中大致相似。确定了其他影响，包括祖父母死亡的影响如何随上次出生后的时间以及死亡前的居住距离而变化。我们解释了我们关于祖父母死亡影响的发现如何提供对在世祖父母角色的洞察力。