Is it just a matter of personality? On the role of well-being in childbearing behavior

This paper analyses the role played by individual subjective well-being (SWB) in childbearing behavior. We use the German Socio Economic Panel (GSOEP) survey, which contains repeated information about SWB, childbearing events and, importantly, also measures of respondents’ personality, to estimate the way SWB matters for having a(nother) child, controlling for personality traits (PTs). We find that SWB positively predicts childbearing for women and men, with the effect significant (and sizeable) for both genders only for the second child. Furthermore, we assure that – although PTs are a strong component of SWB variability – the effect of SWB on fertility is not determined by PTs.