First-Birth Gains and Losses from the First Job in Italy: The Role of Employment Uncertainty

Previous research on the link between employment uncertainty and fertility has focused on the existence of a statistically significant effect of contractual arrangements on fertility, largely disregarding the magnitude of the effect in question. In this article, we address this oversight for Italy using retrospective data from the nationally representative 2009 Family and Social Subjects survey. We adopt the potential outcome approach to causal inference to quantify the net effect of first jobs (temporary or permanent) on the propensity to have a first child within the first five years of employment. We find that 7% of first-birth losses among women and 5% of first-birth losses among men are attributable to employment uncertainty: they would have had a first child if they had had a permanent job. For women, first-birth losses are especially elevated among those with higher education (reaching 16%), while for men first-birth losses are pronounced among those with low and medium educational attainment.