Career or family? The choice of working in the public versus private sector for Italian women and their fertility plan

Name: Career or family? The choice of working in the public versus private sector for Italian women and their fertility plan
Brand: Vita e Pensiero
Price: 6.00 EUR
Availability: OnlineOnly

digital

Article

Magazine

RIVISTA INTERNAZIONALE DI SCIENZE SOCIALI

Issue

RIVISTA INTERNAZIONALE DI SCIENZE SOCIALI - 2013 - 2

Title

Career or family? The choice of working in the public versus private sector for Italian women and their fertility plan

Author

Laura Cavalli

Publisher

Vita e Pensiero

Format

Article |

Pdf

Pages

Online from

06-2014

Issn

0035-676X (print) | 1827-7918 (digital)

€ 6.00

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Description

This work aims at understanding whether, and the extent to which, the intention of having other children is influenced by aspects related to the employment sector chosen by ‘‘new’’ mothers. Using Italian data from the Birth Sample Survey (ISTAT-2005), this work models new mothers’
preferences for family formation and for ‘‘working conditions’’, namely the sector of employment, taking into account the potential endogeneity of the latter. Working in the public sector, which benefits from stronger employment protection, tends to influence the desired (realized) fertility of working mothers. However, the choice of the working sector could be endogenous. Actually, once the selection effect is taken into account and the choice of working sector and the desired fertility are modelled together, the correlation among unobservable women’s characteristics affecting the two choices is found to be negative: women who desire more children seem to be less likely to self-select into the public sector.

Keywords: Desired Fertility, Total Demand for Children, Working Mothers, Public-Private Sector, Seemingly Unrelated Regression models.