When the COVID‐19 pandemic began in early 2020, speculation was rife both in public and academic spheres over its possible effects on birth rates and partnership behavior. Now, over four years later, we still know surprisingly little about the effect of COVID‐19 on fertility and family dynamics. In this paper, we outline three main takeaways from the scientific literature produced on this topic in the past four years. We argue that (1) we still do not have enough data to answer basic questions about the effect of COVID‐19 on fertility and family dynamics, (2) the data we do have suggest an unexpectedly incoherent and heterogeneous response, and (3) the estimated effects we do have are suspect since shifting and theoretically unexpected prepandemic fertility behavior made identifying a strict causal effect of the pandemic problematic.

中文翻译：

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COVID-19 大流行后的生育率和家庭动态


当 COVID-19 大流行于 2020 年初开始时，公众和学术界普遍猜测其可能对出生率和伴侣行为产生影响。现在，四年多过去了，我们对 COVID-19 对生育和家庭动态的影响仍然知之甚少。在本文中，我们概述了过去四年中有关该主题的科学文献的三个主要要点。我们认为，(1) 我们仍然没有足够的数据来回答有关 COVID-19 对生育和家庭动态影响的基本问题，(2) 我们现有的数据表明反应出乎意料地不一致和异质，(3)我们所估计的影响确实值得怀疑，因为大流行前生育行为的变化和理论上的意外使得确定大流行的严格因果影响变得困难。