| Abstract: |
We assess how employment uncertainty due to experiencing plant closure relates
to childbearing among women and men in Norway. We use plant (workplace)
closure as an indicator of employment uncertainty to infer a causal effect of
experiencing employment uncertainty on fertility outcomes. We use
population-level register data for 1999-2014 and event history analysis with
logit models of first and second births separately. Our results show that for
men, first-birth probabilities remained almost the same within three years of
experiencing plant closure, while for women, first- and second-birth
probabilities decreased a year before the plant closure, possibly due to
anticipation effects, but first-birth probabilities increased by three
percentage points in the year of the closure, possibly due to declining
opportunity costs. Similarly, for women experiencing plant closure,
second-birth probabilities increased by two percentage points in the year of
closure compared to the year before closure. The fertility response to
experiencing plant closure remained the same for men before (1999-2008) and
after the economic crisis (2009-2014). For women, first-birth probabilities
increased 1.2 percentage points within three years of the closure, though this
increase declined slightly to 0.8 percentage points after the recession
period. We conclude that in a setting with high social security levels,
experiencing plant closure does not affect men's fertility outcomes (first or
second birth), while it increases women’s probabilities of having children
within three years of the closure. We find no significant differences in the
number of children at age 49 between those who did and did not experience
plant closure. Therefore, we conclude that plant closure had a slightly
positive tempo effect on women’s fertility in the years around the closure,
but did not have a significant quantum effect on women's fertility. This could
be because the scarring (negative long-term) effects of experiencing plant
closure on fertility dissipated after a few years due to Norway’s generous
welfare benefits, and because fertility readjusted after the shock. Thus,
workers experiencing plant closure in Norway might have seen it as an
opportunity to realise their childbearing ideals over the shorter term and at
younger ages. |