Transforming Gompertz's Function for Fertility Analysis: The Development of a Standard for the Relational Gompertz Function

Summary The relational Gompertz function improves upon the Gompertz for fertility analysis by achieving a better fit in the tails of the distribution. This is obtained by a transformation of the age scale corresponding to an empirical standard. This standard is developed from Coale and Trussell's model and is appropriate for use with populations of high fertility. The model is tested on two sets of data and is shown to produce good estimates of completed fertility even for data truncated at quite early ages. Good results are also obtained for declining fertility.