Abstract
A rise in female labour-market participation and a decline in birth rates have been observed in most European countries. Nevertheless, in the past decade, several countries, notably France, Spain and Germany, have experienced a joint increase in female participation and fertility, mainly because of national policies aimed at balancing work and family life.
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Notes
- 1.
The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Bank of Italy or of Istat. We are grateful to Renata Bottazi, Luigi Cannari, Giovanni D’Alessio and Federico Signorini for their helpful comments. Although the paper is a collective work, Sects. 3.1 and 3.2 are to be attributed to Piero Casadio; Sects. 3.3 and 3.7 to Martina Lo Conte; Sects. 3.4, 3.5 and 3.6 to Andrea Neri.
- 2.
This time-pattern remains fairly similar for mothers with two children, while a third child negatively affects the probability of re-entering the labour market. In particular, for women with at least three children, the employment rate remains 10-20 percentage points below that for women without children, even when the youngest child is aged over 12.
- 3.
- 4.
A significant difference between the two statistics remains even when the age structure used by the IBSS is imposed on LFS the data.
- 5.
Specifically, the share of employed mothers in the IBSS is about 6% points above the LFS share in the Northern regions; 10 pp in the Centre and more than 12 pp in the South and Islands.
- 6.
In the LFS, the transitions are only available at a one-year distance.
- 7.
In the IBSS data, the sample selection problem may heavily bias estimates of the probability of new mothers being in work 18–21 months after childbirth. Consider, for example, the extreme situation in which women’s working conditions are either fully protected (as in the public sector) or not protected at all (as in the case of a fixed-term contract with a small private firm). If the degree of protection were the only determinant of having children—total sample selection—only women benefiting from a high degree of job protection would have a significant probability of having a child. As a consequence, the sample would consist mainly of mothers working in protected sectors, and most of them would retain their jobs after childbirth. Ignoring this selection process would probably give rise to wrong conclusions (for example, according to the data, employment protection legislation would have little effect on new mothers’ employment patterns).
- 8.
A similar result is reported by Bratti, Del Bono and Vuri (2005). In order to test for selection into motherhood, the authors estimated a probit model with sample selection, where the selection equation was represented by the decision to have a first child and the main equation was the employment equation. In none of the specifications of their model did they find a significant correlation between the error terms of the employment and fertility equations.
- 9.
As documented in Solera (2003), Italian women are unlikely to experience a career break more than once in their lives, and this usually occurs in correspondence with the birth of the first child. Moreover, Bratti et al. (2005), on analysing the new mothers’ employment decisions during the 3-year period following the birth of the first child, found that the probabilities of employment are very similar in each year of observation.
- 10.
In the Labour Force Survey, the definition of an unemployed person given to the respondent was someone who had actively looked for a job in the 60 days previous to the interview and intended to start work immediately. This measure could be therefore quite different from that used by the IBSS.
- 11.
We initially also included regional dummy variables and labour market indicators, but their effect was then captured by women’s employment status during pregnancy. These variables were therefore not included in the final specification of the model.
- 12.
It is important to note that this variable could not be included among the covariates of the first equation because it was endogenous. Indeed, the probability of schooling a child depends, among other things, on whether the mother is working, on the household’s total income, and on nationality. We also tested for the absence of endogeneity of this variable, and the results showed that this hypothesis must be rejected.
- 13.
Under the assumption that those variables are not correlated with the error terms in the first equation they represent two “excluded instruments”. In case this assumption doesn’t hold, the results cannot be interpreted as casual effects.
- 14.
By contrast, fixed-term contracts do not seem to a have an appreciable impact. This is not surprising, given the dependent variable. In the analysis, if the contract expired and was not renewed, it was not classified as resignation.
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Neri, A., Conte, M.L., Casadio, P. (2012). Balancing Work and Family: New Mothers’ Employment Decisions During Childbearing. In: Addabbo, T., Solinas, G. (eds) Non-Standard Employment and Quality of Work. AIEL Series in Labour Economics. Physica-Verlag HD. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7908-2106-2_3
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