Scandinavian Working Papers in Economics

Discussion Papers,
Statistics Norway, Research Department

No 624: Mother's employment and fertility in Norway

Mette Gerster and Trude Lappegård ()
Additional contact information
Trude Lappegård: Statistics Norway

Abstract: This paper concerns the effect of employment status on second- and third-birth intensities for Norwegian mothers in the period 1994-2002. Due to unobserved heterogeneity possibly affecting both the birth and the employment processes we employ a simultaneous equations approach for hazard models, originally suggested by Lillard (1993). Our results show that there is a slightly positive effect of currently being in employment on the second-birth intensity, whereas the third-birth intensity is larger for women who are currently non-employed, even when unobserved heterogeneity is taken into account. This suggests that even in a society such as the Norwegian in which there is a high compatibility between motherhood and labour market attachment there are still certain costs associated with childbearing and that this is taken into account by Norwegian women, in particular when it comes to the progression to third child.

Keywords: Fertility; employment; family policy

JEL-codes: J01; J13 June 2010

Full text files

dp624.pdf PDF-file 

Download statistics

Questions (including download problems) about the papers in this series should be directed to L Maasø ()
Report other problems with accessing this service to Sune Karlsson ().

RePEc:ssb:dispap:624This page generated on 2024-10-30 04:36:26.