Education and the Transition Motherhood: a Comparative Analysis of Western Europe

This study focuses on microlevel interrelationship between the educational trajectories of women and the transition to motherhood. We disentangle the impact of events in one trajectory on events in the other trajectory, from common factors such as aspirations and orientations that simultaneously affect both trajectories. We argue that macrolevel institutional and factors are the key ones shaping this interrelationship. To shed light on the empirical relevance of macrolevel factors, we adopt an international comparative approach. We apply simultaneous hazard models to individuallevel data from Fertility and Family Surveys (FFS) in 11 Western European countries. We find important international differences in microlevel relationships: the mutual influence and the importance of common factors for both processes are weaker where welfare regimes, and social policies that allow role combinations in particular, are stronger. Acknowledgments We thank Øystein Kravdal and the participants to a presentation at the Department of Economics and Quantitative Methods of the University of Pavia for comments and suggestions on preliminary versions of this paper. Billari acknowledges the support of the Vienna Institute of Demography.