The Changing Relationship of Employment and Women’s Fertility in the Post-Recession Years

Trude Lappegard, University of Oslo
Tom Kornstad, Statistics Norway
Lars Dommermuth, Statistics Norway
Axel Kristensen, University of Oslo

The aim of this paper is to investigate whether the relationship between fertility and women’s employment has changed over time, and especially so during the post-recession years in Norway. The point of departure is a puzzling decline in fertility since 2010 where the fertility level has dropped from 1.98 to 1.40 in 2023 in Norway. At the individual level, employment and income are fundamental in people’s lives, and the changing role of women’s employment on fertility could be a key factor in understanding the downward trend in fertility levels in Norway. To test this, we will explore the effects of full-time employment, part-time employment and not being employed on fertility, and see whether these effects has changed over time in Norway, and whether such effects vary by educational attainment. We will use high-quality register data with yearly information that spans across almost three decades (1993-2020). To account for the possibility that the birth processes and the employment processes could be jointly determined, we apply joint modelling of hazard models for different birth transitions and employment. Preliminary results show that the effect of working full-time increases stronger for both entering motherhood and for higher parities especially .

Keywords: Fertility, Longitudinal studies , Simulation

See extended abstract.