Career or family? The choice of working in the public versus private sector for italian women and their fertility plan

This work aims at understanding whether, and the extent to which, the intention of having other children is influenced by aspects related to the employment sector chosen by ‘‘new’’ mothers. Using Italian data from the Birth Sample Survey (ISTAT-2005), this work models new mothers’ preferences for family formation and for ‘‘working conditions’’, namely the sector of employment, taking into account the potential endogeneity of the latter. Working in the public sector, which benefits from stronger employment protection, tends to influence the desired (realized) fertility of working mothers. However, the choice of the working sector could be endogenous. Actually, once the selection effect is taken into account and the choice of working sector and the desired fertility are modelled together, the correlation among unobservable women’s characteristics affecting the two choices is found to be negative: women who desire more children seem to be less likely to self-select into the public sector.