Second Birth and Women's Employment: A Fallacious Mutual Impact? Evidence from Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal in the 1990s

Pau Baizán, Universitat Pompeu Fabra and Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA)

Heterogeneity among women in their propensity to combine paid work and mothering, as well as other unmeasured attributes, may affect both, the rate of second birth and the rates of participation in paid work. In this paper, I use a modeling strategy that accounts explicitly for the endogeneity of these processes, by taking into account the correlation between the unmeasured factors across processes. A longitudinal sample of the European Community Household Panel is used for the analyses. The results show that those women who are more likely to have a second birth are also least likely to enter paid work, and more likely to exit from paid work. However, those women who exit from paid work are also least likely to have a second birth, suggesting that women experiencing difficulties in keeping jobs have lower fertility. Employed and unemployed women have lower second birth rates.