The Changing Links Between Socioeconomic Status and Single Women's Entry Into Parenthood (Musni and Schnor, 2025)
https://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.70006
Data Preparation and Analysis Codes


The data preparation involved the following steps to prepare intermediate files from various data sources (registers, tax declarations, censuses), then linking them together through anonymous IDs

"Data prep" files included in this repository:

1.1 Preparing the base file
1.2 Creating datasets containing births to women per year, according to the dates of birth of her registered children
1.3 Creating datasets containing population moves (deaths and migrations), which will be used for identifying union formation and dissolution
1.4 Creating datasets tracking union formations and dissoluitions
1.5 Preparing the income data
1.6 Merging the intermediate files
1.7 Creationg the final datasets for analysis

The Analysis file ("2.0 Analysis") shows descriptives, data checks, survival analysis, and robustness checks


This study uses data from Statbel (Directorate-General Statistics—Statistics Belgium)—Demobel (adaptation of the National Register), Census 2001, Census 2011, IPCAL (processed by Statistics Belgium). These datasets were accessed through the FamilyTies project (request number 2021/092), approved by Statbel. Computational resources have been provided by the supercomputing facilities of the Université catholique de Louvain (CISM/UCL) and the Consortium des Équipements de Calcul Intensif en Fédération Wallonie Bruxelles (CÉCI) funded by the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (F.R.S.-FNRS) under convention 2.5020.11 and by the Walloon Region. The authors thank Statbel, and particularly Patrick Lusyne, Cloë Ost, and Gisèle Vandervelpen for preparing the datasets and making anonymized data available for research, the Centre for Demographic Research (DEMO) of UCLouvain for allowing us to access the data, and the CISM team for managing the statistical servers.