Employment Trajectories and Fertility in Italy

Fausta Ongaro , Università di Padova
Silvia Meggiolaro, Università di Padova
Marco Tosi, University of Padua

The study aims to analyse whether and how the characteristics of the employment/education history by age 30 is associated with the cumulated fertility at the age of 30 and has consequences on the completed fertility (at age 45). Data from the survey “Families and Social Subjects”, conducted by the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) in 2016, are used within a sequence analysis framework to describe the histories of individuals aged 45-60 and to account for complex time-related interdependencies among employment episodes. More specifically, we create employment/ education sequences till the age of 30 and use optimal matching method to determine distances between sequences. Cluster analysis is, then, performed to identify typologies of employment trajectories, which are used as a key covariate in Poisson regression models estimating fertility at age 30 and age 45. Preliminary analyses suggest that employment/education histories are associated with fertility, but with some unexpected results. Men and women entering the labour market at a later age have, on average, fewer children by age 30 than individuals with other employment/education trajectories. However, this negative negative association disapperas when we analyse fertility at age 45; suggesting that individuals who postpone their entance into the labor market are able to recover in the long run. Individuals with uncertain employment histories (characterized by fixed-term contracts and some interruptions of inactivity and unemployment) are, instead, not associated with lower fertility levels. Lastly, women who never worked tend to be caracterised by larger families at age 30.

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 Presented in Session P1. Fertility, Family, Life Course