Parametric graduation of male fertility rates

Paraskevi Peristera, Athens University of Economics and Business
Anastasia Kostaki, Athens University of Economics and Business

The study of female fertility and the modelling of female fertility curves has always attracted the interest of demographers. In contrast to the attention paid to female fertility patterns, little work has been done on the estimation of male fertility pattern as well as on the study of male fertility trends. Several biological, methodological and sociological reasons justify the exclusion of males from fertility studies. In this work, we evaluate parametric techniques, which have been successfully used in the case of female fertility curves, for estimating the age fertility pattern of males. In that, we use the parametric P-K models for estimating the male fertility pattern of several populations, based on data from the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth. We also provide estimates differentiated by age, sex, race and ethnicity. Finally, using the P-K models we study the evolution of the fertility trends of males through time but we also use the above models as tools for comparisons between male and female fertility patterns .