During the 2010s, fertility rates fell across the Nordic region. The
onset of these declines seems linked to the Great Recession of
2008–2009, but their continuation cannot easily be linked to subsequent
economic change. The 1990s, too, brought episodes of economic crises to
the Nordic region that were followed by different degrees of fertility
decline. In this study, we provide an empirical overview of parity-,
age- and education-specific fertility developments in the five Nordic
countries in the wake of the economic recessions in 2008 and the early
1990s, respectively. We demonstrate a high degree of heterogeneity in
fertility developments across countries after 1990, whereas after 2008,
the trends are much more similar across the five countries. Likewise,
the educational differences in birth hazards that characterized the
developments after 1990 were much smaller in the initial years after
2008–2009. This reversal from heterogeneity to homogeneity in the
fertility response to recessions calls for an expansion of theories on
the cyclicality of fertility in relation to uncertainty and economic and
social change. In our discussion, we consider the role of a set of
factors that also incorporates the state, crisis management, and
perceptions of economic and welfare uncertainty.