Job bust, baby bust?: Evidence from Spain

Poverty and living arrangements among youth in Spain, 1980-2005

“…See Ahn and Mira (2001) for a study of the relationship between the lack of stable employment among males and a delay in marriage and first childbirth in Spain. 27 Jurado Guerrero (1997) observed for 1991 that unemployed or inactive girls tended to move from 'parental dependency' to 'husband dependency' when leaving home.…”

Not truly partnerless: Non-residential partnerships and retreat from marriage in Spain

“…However, the emergence of lowest-low fertility in the early 1990s in Southern Europe, the region with less diversified family forms, questioned the initial assumption of convergence (Billari and Wilson 2001), led to a re-evaluation of the main theories of fertility (Kertzer et al 2006), and strengthened the view of path dependency (Blossfeld 2003). In order to explain the "paradox" of lowest-low fertility coexisting with traditional family patterns in Southern Europe (Dalla Zuanna and Micheli 2004), some scholars have emphasized socioeconomic barriers to union formation, such as high youth unemployment (Ahn and Mira 2001), increasing uncertainty linked to unstable job positions (Simó et al 2005), and tight housing markets (Holdsworth and Irazoqui 2002). Other scholars have focused on the institutional barriers to union formation, such as the familism embedded in the welfare system -which presumes that the family is primarily responsible for the well-being of its members-, and the lack of specific public policies directed at young adults, which reinforce their dependency on the family (Esping-Andersen 1999, Jurado Guerrero and Naldini 1996).…”

Unstable work histories and fertility in France

“…It was Myrskylä, Kohler, and Billari (2009) who made the strongest, most explicit case for this regimechange hypothesis, showing how the historically negative correlation between development and fertility becomes positive after countries exceed a certain threshold of human development. This conclusion was supported by a series of papers published in the early and mid-2000s that showed that the correlation between women's labor force participation and fertility rates across countries had also reversed, and that countries with a higher number of women in the labor force also presented higher fertility rates (Ahn and Mira 2001;Adsera 2004;Kohler, Billari, and Ortega 2002). Although evidence of the above-mentioned trends at the micro-level is more ambiguous than at the aggregate level (Matysiak and Vignoli 2008), the new narrative surrounding economic conditions and family formation seems to have gained a foothold in fertility analyses, which has translated into an increased interest in the constraints and limitations driving fertility decisions in industrialized countries.…”