Labour market flexibility, education and completed fertility in 14 European countries
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Abstract
Factors determining fertility are multidimensional, ranging from individual characteristics such as educational attainment and broader childbearing intentions to the socio-economic context and institutional support provided by family policies in a given country. Another important determinant of fertility is individuals’ professional career stability which can be measured by the number of job changes.
The aim of this study is to investigate the associations between the number of children of mothers with the existing employment history (excluding childless women), education and labour market characteristics, individual career histories and job satisfaction in 14 European countries: Austria, Belgium, Czechia, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. In particular, labour market characteristics and career histories examined in this study are analysed with a focus on individual and country-level flexibility of the labour market. It was found that education is negatively associated with the number of children of mothers aged 47 or older in analysed countries. Fertility patterns of highly educated mothers appear to be influenced by different factors than those of less educated mothers. Professional career stability and job satisfaction seem to have a relatively strong influence on mothers with tertiary education – as indicated by instrumental variable zero-truncated Poisson models. Moreover, divergent results connected with the employment flexibility of the individual and country- level brought about twofold conclusion: relatively less stable professional careers of mothers are negatively associated with the number of children: frequent job changes were generally undesirable by the middle-aged and older cohorts of mothers. Nevertheless, a more rigid labour market is also associated with lower completed fertility. Country-level flexibility, as measured by bargaining union coverage, appears to reflect labour market rigidity – hindering mothers’ ability to return to the labour market post-childbirth – rather than stability that protects mothers from dropping out of the labour market. Finally, including economic status in the analysis indicated that job changes between the ages of 25 and 29 have the strongest impact on the completed fertility of 1910s–1960s female birth cohorts.
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