Women’s labor force attachment and childbearing in Finland

This paper analyzes the impact of women’s economic activity, earnings and take-up of child home care allowance on childbearing, using a ten percent sample from a longitudinal register data set that covers the entire female population of reproductive age in Finland in 1988–2000. Results show that a woman’s economic activity and income were positively correlated with entry into motherhood and to a lesser extent with having a second child. This supports the notion of a common pattern of this relationship in the Nordic countries. In the light of Finland’s rollercoaster economic development in the 1990s, the effects of a change in female population composition by economic characteristics on the fertility trend were small.