World War II, Missing Men and Out of Wedlock Childbearing
利用德国巴伐利亚州县级数据，以二战为自然实验，发现男性短缺显著提高了非婚生育率，且战俘比例越高的地区效应越小，因为战俘更可能返乡改善未来婚姻前景。
Drawing upon county‐level census data for the German state of Bavaria in 1939 and 1946, we use World War II (WWII) as a natural experiment to study the effects of changes in the adult sex ratio on out of wedlock fertility. Our findings show that war‐induced shortfalls of men significantly increased the non‐marital fertility ratio in the middle of the century. Furthermore, we find that the regional magnitude of this effect varies with the county‐level share of prisoners of war (POWs) in an inverse manner. Unlike military casualties and soldiers missing in action, POWs had a sizeable positive probability of returning home from the war. It appears therefore that both current marriage market conditions and foreseeable improvements in the future marriage market prospects of women influenced fertility behaviour in the immediate aftermath of WWII.