The Causal Impact of Temporary Employment on First Births in Italy: An Update

Rising economic uncertainty is widely considered in the literature as one of the driving forces behind the postponement of childbearing and the reduction in fertility rates in contemporary Europe, especially following the Great Recession. Understanding whether employment instability causally and negatively impacts fertility decisions is of fundamental importance to providing clear recommendations to policymakers. To the best of our knowledge, the only study applying a counterfactual approach to the study of the causal impact of temporary employment for the transition to parenthood is a recent article by Vignoli, Tocchioni, and Mattei (2020). The present study replicates such a paper utilizing more recent data for Italy (2016, instead of 2009), thus covering a period encompassing the time of the Great Recession. We adopt the potential outcome approach to causal inference so as to quantify the net effect of having a first job with a temporary vs. permanent contract on the propensity to have a first child within the first five years of employment. Our findings confirm a clear-cut causal effect of temporary employment on first birth postponement. Even among men, we found negative causal effects of a first experience of temporary work, although less intense. These results largely overlap with those obtained by Vignoli and colleagues (2020), demonstrating how precarious work has by now become a structural factor discouraging the transition to parenthood among young Italians.