This paper analyses the postponement of first births of the 1990s compared to the 1980s, using panel data from four countries, namely, Germany (GSOEP), Great Britain (BHPS), the Netherlands (OSA) and Sweden (HUS). We find substantial postponement of maternity in all four countries for all educational groups with the most pronounced postponement among highly educated women in all four countries. However the mean age of the mother when giving birth to the first child reamained the lowest in Great among the four countries in both decades.

Theoretically we can distinguish two motives for postponing maternity, namely, the consumptionsmoothing motive and the career-planning motive. In this paper we concentrate on an important determinant of the maternal time costs: the time spent out of paid employment.

We make use of longitudinal information about the number of months elapsed since first birth until the mother is observed working in the labour market. We estimate parametric duration ...