https://ikprress.org/index.php/JOGRESS <p><strong>Journal of Global Research in Education and Social Science</strong> (<strong>ISSN: 2454-1834</strong>) aims to publish high quality papers in all areas of ‘Education and Social Science’. This journal considers following <a href="https://ikprress.org/index.php/JOGRESS/about/submissions">types of papers </a>(<a href="https://ikprress.org/index.php/JOGRESS/about/submissions">Link</a>). The journal also encourages the submission of useful reports of negative results. This is a peer-reviewed, open access INTERNATIONAL journal. This journal follows OPEN access policy. All published articles can be freely downloaded from the journal website.</p> en-US [email protected] (International Knowledge Press) [email protected] (International Knowledge Press) Mon, 15 Jun 2026 10:46:23 +0000 OJS 3.3.0.21 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss 60 https://ikprress.org/index.php/JOGRESS/article/view/10721 <p><strong>Background:</strong> Fertility behavior is a key area of economic and demographic research because of its strong connections to human capital formation, labor market outcomes, and long-term economic development. Early childbearing is particularly important as it can adversely affect women's educational attainment, employment opportunities, and lifetime earnings, while also generating lasting intergenerational consequences.</p> <p><strong>Aims: </strong>This study asks whether institutional gendered constraints shift the distribution of first births rather than affecting overall fertility levels.</p> <p><strong>Study Design:</strong> A longitudinal cross-country panel study combining a continuous-time life-cycle model with fixed-effects econometric analysis.</p> <p><strong>Place and Duration of Study:</strong> The study was conducted using annual country-level data from 100 countries worldwide obtained from the World Bank, UNESCO, and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), covering the period between 1990 and 2023.</p> <p><strong>Methodology: </strong>The paper combines a continuous-time life-cycle model with a strongly balanced panel of 100 countries observed annually from 1990 to 2023. Fertility timing is proxied by adolescent first births, capturing mass in the lower tail of the first-birth distribution. Gender inequality is measured using the UNDP Gender Inequality Index. Two-way fixed-effects models exploit within-country variation over time and allow for nonlinear and dynamic specifications.</p> <p><strong>Results: </strong>The study analyzed a balanced panel of 100 countries from 1990 to 2023 comprising 3,400 country–year observations. Higher Gender Inequality Index (GII) values were significantly associated with earlier fertility timing in fixed-effects models (β = 0.0126, SE = 0.0057, p &lt; 0.05), and the relationship remained robust after controlling for gender development and schooling. Lagged models showed similar positive effects of prior gender inequality on early fertility timing (β = 0.0108, SE = 18.90, p &lt; 0.10). Nonlinear specifications revealed significant regime dependence ( F = 18.90 , p &lt; 0.001), with stronger effects in highly unequal environments. Dynamic models further showed strong persistence in fertility timing over time (β = 0.981 , SE = 0.004, p &lt; 0.001).</p> <p><strong>Conclusions: </strong>Institutional gender inequality reduces incentives to delay childbearing by lowering the opportunity cost of early fertility. The findings indicate that fertility timing responds primarily to structural constraints rather than short-term fluctuations.</p> Masaaki Yoshimori Copyright (c) 2026 Author(s). The licensee is the journal publisher. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. https://ikprress.org/index.php/JOGRESS/article/view/10721 Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000