Bassa fecondità e istruzione nell’Italia di fine Novecento

LOW FERTILITY AND EDUCATION IN ITALY AT THE END OF XX CENTURY.Several studies suggest that in Italy in the last decades the negative effect of education on fertility has disappeared or has changed sign. However, recent analyses developed in other countries highlight that the relation between education and fertility should be analyzed taking selection bias under control. With this purpose, we developed multiprocess hazard models with four simultaneous equations (one for each birth order) including an unobserved heterogeneity component at the individual level and we applied them to a large data sample coming from the ISTAT Multipurpose survey called “Aspetti della vita quotidiana”. For second, third and fourth birth order, the positive effect of education, that emerged from descriptive analysis and from models with independent equations, is simply due to a spurious relation. Net of selectivity, a negative relation between education and fertility emerges for the second and higher birth order. The preservation of the “traditional” link between education and fertility in Italy could be due to the peculiarities of the welfare regime.