His unemployment, her response, and the moderating role of welfare policies in European countries.

Recent changes in labour markets have increased employment instability. Under these conditions, in male breadwinner families women might increase their labour supply when their male partners become unemployed. Previous studies have extensively investigated the role played by household and individual characteristics in explaining such increases in the labour supply of women. However, studies which examine the moderating role of specific welfare policies are missing. Our study contributes to the literature by investigating the moderating effect of childcare and tax-benefit policies for the labour supply response of women following the unemployment of their partner. We focus on a sample of 24 EU member states and the UK, during the period 2009-2019, combining longitudinal microdata from EU-SILC with country-period specific policy indicators generated with the use of the tax-benefit simulation model EUROMOD, UKMOD and country-period specific indicators of childcare use.

Employment Instability and Fertility in Europe: A Meta-Analysis.

The relationship between employment instability and fertility is a major topic in demographic research, with a proliferation of published papers on this matter, especially since the Great Recession. Employment instability, which most often manifests in unemployment or time-limited employment, is usually deemed to have a negative effect on fertility, although different fertility reactions are hypothesized by sociological theories, and micro-level evidence is fragmented and contradictory. We used meta-analytic techniques to synthesize European research findings, offer general conclusions about the effects of employment instability on fertility (in terms of direction and size), and rank different sources of employment instability. Our results suggest that employment instability has a nonnegligible negative effect on fertility. Men's unemployment is more detrimental for fertility than men's time-limited employment; conversely, a woman having a fixed-term contract is least likely to have a child. Next, the negative effect of employment instability on fertility has become stronger over time, and is more severe in Southern European countries, where social protection for families and the unemployed is least generous. Finally, meta-regression estimates demonstrate that failing to account for income and partner characteristics leads to an overestimation of the negative effect of employment instability on fertility. We advance the role of these two factors as potential mechanisms by which employment instability affects fertility. Overall, this meta-analysis provides the empirical foundation for new studies on the topic.

Partners' Educational Pairings and Fertility Across Europe.

We provide new evidence on the education-fertility relationship by using EU-SILC panel data on 24 European countries to investigate how couples' educational pairings predict their childbearing behavior. We focus on differences in first-, second-, and third-birth rates among couples with varying combinations of partners' education. Our results show important differences in how education relates to parity progressions depending on the education of the partner. First, highly educated homogamous couples show a distinct childbearing behavior in most country clusters. They tend to postpone the first birth most and display the highest second- and third-birth rates. Second, contrary to what may be expected based on the "new home economics" approach, hypergamous couples with a highly educated male and a lower-educated female partner display among the lowest second-birth transitions. Our findings underscore the relevance of interacting both partners' education for a better understanding of the education-fertility relationship.

The educational gradient in marital disruption: a meta-analysis of European research findings.

A large number of empirical studies have investigated the effects of women's education on union dissolution in Europe, but results have varied substantially. This paper seeks to assess the relationship between educational attainment and the incidence of marital disruption by systematizing the existing empirical evidence. A quantitative literature review (a meta-analysis) was conducted to investigate the temporal change in the relationship, net of inter-study differences. The results point to a weakening of the positive educational gradient in marital disruption over time and even to a reversal in the direction of this gradient in some countries. The findings also show that the change in the educational gradient can be linked to an increase in access to divorce. Finally, the results suggest that women's empowerment has played an important role in changing the educational gradient, while the liberalization of divorce laws has not.