Employment uncertainty and reproductive decisions in Norway: a register-based study based on plant closures

We assess how employment uncertainty due to experiencing plant closure relates to childbearing among women and men in Norway. We use plant (workplace) closure as an indicator of employment uncertainty to infer a causal effect of experiencing employment uncertainty on fertility outcomes. We use population-level register data for 1999-2014 and event history analysis with logit models of first and second births separately. Our results show that for men, first-birth probabilities remained almost the same within three years of experiencing plant closure, while for women, first- and second-birth probabilities decreased a year before the plant closure, possibly due to anticipation effects, but first-birth probabilities increased by three percentage points in the year of the closure, possibly due to declining opportunity costs. Similarly, for women experiencing plant closure, second-birth probabilities increased by two percentage points in the year of closure compared to the year before closure. The fertility response to experiencing plant closure remained the same for men before (1999-2008) and after the economic crisis (2009-2014). For women, first-birth probabilities increased 1.2 percentage points within three years of the closure, though this increase declined slightly to 0.8 percentage points after the recession period. We conclude that in a setting with high social security levels, experiencing plant closure does not affect men's fertility outcomes (first or second birth), while it increases women’s probabilities of having children within three years of the closure. We find no significant differences in the number of children at age 49 between those who did and did not experience plant closure. Therefore, we conclude that plant closure had a slightly positive tempo effect on women’s fertility in the years around the closure, but did not have a significant quantum effect on women's fertility. This could be because the scarring (negative long-term) effects of experiencing plant closure on fertility dissipated after a few years due to Norway’s generous welfare benefits, and because fertility readjusted after the shock. Thus, workers experiencing plant closure in Norway might have seen it as an opportunity to realise their childbearing ideals over the shorter term and at younger ages.