Type of Employers and Fertility of Working Women: Does Working in the Public Sector or in a Large Private Firm Matter?

This work investigates how fertility rates of working women have been influenced by employer characteristics (public versus private sector and small versus large firms) and features of the employment contracts using a representative sample of Italian working women in the last 30 years of the twentieth century. In particular, we find that women working in the public sector have a higher probability of having a child during a working spell than women working in the private sector. Furthermore, women working in large private sector firms, who enjoy stronger employment protection, have a higher probability of having a child than those working in smaller firms. In turn, more-stable contracts also increase the likelihood of having a child during a working spell. Results are robust to controlling for individual unobserved heterogeneity and for the possible endogeneity of working in the public sector.