This paper analyses two questions. First, how do otherwise similar people across four countries end up in fourdifferent employment states: 1) full-time with a regular contract, 2) part-time with a regular contract, 3) fixedterm contract full-time or part-time and 4) self-employed? Second, how do...

We use data from Great Britain, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden to examine whether part-time and intermittent work during early motherhood leads to regular full-time work later. We find that in Sweden, by the time the first child is four years old 80 percent of mothers are working full-time...