Fertility choices and early career job instability

Presenter: Ludovica Giua, University of Essex

Author: Ludovica Giua

In this analysis, I investigate the impact of job instability during the labour market early career of British young women on their fertility choices, using retrospective information from the British Household Panel Survey. This allows me to look at a sufficiently wide time-span (1959-2008) and to evaluate fertility outcomes in the long-run. I also try to disentangle the effect between voluntary and involuntary job turnover. In fact, while voluntary turnover may be a prerogative of career-oriented women, experiencing involuntary job changes may be associated with individuals who have stronger family taste. In order to account for the endogeneity of job experience to fertility, I instrument job turnover with historical series of the British Labour Statistics and the Labour Force Survey. Preliminary estimates suggest that experiencing both involuntary and voluntary job changes seems to negatively affect the number of children born.