The role of education in the partnership and family formation process in Europe and the United States

Using harmonised retrospective fertility and union histories from a set of nationally representative surveys from 14 European countries and the United States (the Harmonized Histories), I study how the influence of educational attainment on partnership and family formation transitions changes over the life course. Previous research is limited to either examining this influence for a very specific segment of the family life course or by only investigating single or competing transitions. By applying multistate event history models, I provide an innovative approach to understand the changing role of education over the family life course. This approach enables me to disentangle the influence of education on each and every partnership and family formation transition. As these influences come from the same model, they are directly comparable. This allows me to assess whether the influence of education changes over the family life course. I compare and contrast the results in a cross-national context for women born between 1950 and 1979.