The long-term goal of this research is to understand the determinants of the life cycle fertility behavior of successive cohorts of American women and the interconnections between fertility and other individual and family decisions including marriage, contraception, abortion, investment in human capital and labor force behavior of women. This understanding is to be furthered by theoretical research into the nature of family life cycle decisions and the economic factors and certain non-economic forces that shape them; by the exploitation of a number of bodies of data, especially data on the retrospective and longitudinal economic and demographic histories of American families; and by the use of existing econometric techniques and development of new techniques which will permit the estimation in panel data of behavioral parameters suggested by the theory.