Impact of Labor-Force Attachment on Childbearing in Finland in the 1990s

Andres Vikat, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research

Some recent studies have shown that women's labor-force attachment and earnings are positively related with childbearing in the context of a parental-leave system with high level of income replacement. In Finland, public provisions that support childbearing are also relatively generous, but the existing macro-level observations do not suggest such a relationship. This paper investigates the relationship between women's labor-market attachment and childbearing in Finland in 1988-2000 using individual-level data. It also examines the role of this relationship in the fact that fertility level in Finland remained relatively stable throughout the 1990s when the country went through sharply contrasting stages of the business cycle. The analysis is based on a ten-percent sample of the longitudinal register database for fertility studies from Statistics Finland. Individual-level information on the woman's main activity (working, unemployed, studying), level of education and earned income are used as explanatory variables in hazard regression models of childbearing risk.