US General Social Survey 1974--2002

Cross-section data for 9120 women taken from every fourth year of the US General
Social Survey between 1974 and 2002 to investigate the determinants of fertility.

Details
This subset of the US General Social Survey (GSS) for every fourth year between 1974
and 2002 has been selected by Winkelmann and Boes (2009) to investigate the
determinants of fertility. To do so they typically restrict their empirical analysis to the
women for which the completed fertility is (assumed to be) known, employing the
common cutoff of 40 years. Both, the average number of children borne to a woman
and the probability of being childless, are of interest.

Format
A data frame containing 9120 observations on 10 variables.

kids
Number of children. This is coded as a numerical variable but note that the value 8
actually encompasses 8 or more children.

age
Age of respondent.

education
Highest year of school completed.

year
GSS year for respondent.

siblings
Number of brothers and sisters.

agefirstbirth
Woman's age at birth of first child.

ethnicity
factor indicating ethnicity. Is the individual Caucasian ("cauc") or not ("other")?

city16
factor. Did the respondent live in a city (with population > 50,000) at age 16?

lowincome16
factor. Was the income below average at age 16?

immigrant
factor. Was the respondent (or both parents) born abroad?

References
Winkelmann, R., and Boes, S. (2009). Analysis of Microdata, 2nd ed. Berlin and
Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag.