Self-employment as a work-and-family reconciliation strategy? Evidence from Poland

Structural labour market change, cognitive work, and entry to parenthood in Germany

Technological change and globalization have caused unprecedented transformations of labour markets, resulting in a growing division between workers who perform cognitive vs non-cognitive tasks. To date, only few studies have addressed the fertility effects of these long-term structural changes. This study fills that gap. We measure the cognitive task content of occupations using data from the Employment Survey of the German Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training, which we link to individual histories from the German Socio-Economic Panel 1984-2018. We find that women and men with non-cognitive jobs are increasingly less likely to enter parenthood; this is reflected in lower first-birth intensities but also in higher probabilities of childlessness compared with workers in highly cognitive jobs. These findings imply that structural shifts in the labour market are exacerbating disparities between low-skilled and highly skilled individuals, not only within the labour market but also in the realm of family formation.

Employment uncertainty and fertility intentions: Stability or resilience?

The role of employment uncertainty as a fertility driver has previously been studied with a limited set of constructs, leading to inconclusive results. We address this oversight by considering perceived stability of employment and perceived resilience to potential job loss as two key dimensions of employment uncertainty in relation to fertility decision-making. The present study relies on the 2017 Italian Trustlab survey and its employment uncertainty module. We find that perception of resilience to job loss is a powerful predictor of fertility intentions, whereas perception of employment stability has only a limited impact. The observed relationship between resilience and fertility intentions is robust to the inclusion of person-specific risk attitude and does not depend on the unemployment rate or the share of fixed-term contracts in the area of residence. We conclude that the notion of employment uncertainty includes distinct expectations towards the future, which should be considered separately to understand fertility decision-making.Supplementary material for this article is available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/00324728.2021.1939406.

Work and fertility in Taiwan: how do women's and men's career sequences associate with fertility outcomes?

There has been much debate over the micro-level relationship between employment situations and fertility in Europe and Northern America. However, related research in East Asia is scant, although countries in this region have some of the lowest fertility rates in the world. Moreover, most studies analyse the employment-fertility relationship from a static perspective and only for women, which underemphasises life course dynamics and gender heterogeneity of employment careers and their fertility implications. Drawing on retrospective data from the 2017 Taiwan Social Change Survey (TSCS), this study explores women's and men's career trajectories between ages 18 and 40 in Taiwan using sequence cluster analyses. It also examines how career variations associate with different timing and quantum of birth. Empirical results show that economically inactive women experience faster motherhood transitions and have more children by age 40 than women with stable full-time careers. For men, having an unstable career associates with slower fatherhood transitions and a lower number of children. For both genders, self-employed people are the earliest in parenthood transitions and have the highest number of children by midlife. Our findings demonstrate sharp gender contrasts in employment careers and their diversified fertility implications in low-fertility Taiwan.