Employment and fertility in couples: whose employment uncertainty matter most?

Despite the prevailing belief that economic uncertainty discourages people from having children, empirical findings are mixed. A reason for this inconclusive evidence is that most of previous research has focused on the role of employment uncertainty of men and women in isolation, largely disregarding the employment condition of both partners. We contribute to fill this gap, using data from the United Kingdom Household Longitudinal Survey, and adopting the potential outcome approach to causal inference. We investigate whether and how affects the couple-level propensity to have a first child, and the progression to higher-parity births.