The relationship between education and fertility in the presence of a time-varying frailty component

This paper investigates the relationship between fertility and women’s education in Italy, using data from the 2009 Household Multipurpose Survey Family and Social Subjects. We use event history models, adopting a Bayesian approach for inference to study the association between fertility and women’s education in the presence of a time-varying unobserved component. Our analysis shows that either disregarding the unobserved component or assuming a time-constant unobserved heterogeneity can lead to misleading results, at least in the studied context.