Employment, partnership and childbearing decisions of German women and men: A simultaneous hazards approach

This paper investigates the interrelated dynamics of employment, cohabitation and fertility for German women and men. Using a simultaneous hazards approach due to Lillard (1993), I estimate a five-equation model with unobserved heterogeneity. One of the contributions of this paper is to include the current employment and nonemployment hazard rates and the union formation and union dissolution hazard rates as regressors. My results suggest that being employed or nonemployed only has small effects on other transitions, but that employed women with a high hazard of becoming nonemployed are less likely to have children, while nonemployed men having a low hazard of finding a job are more likely to have children. Children reduce the hazard of taking up a job for women and reduce the hazard of becoming nonemployed for women and men. Children also increase the stability of unions. Having a partner strongly increases the likelihood for having children. Interestingly, unions with a high risk of splitting up are more likely to have children. Economically, this can be interpreted as an attempt to invest in partner-specification capital in order to reduce the likelihood of splitting up.