Postponement (1) of Maternity and the Duration of Time Spent at Home after First Birth Panel Data Analyses Comparing Germany,Great Britain,the Netherlands and Sweden (2)

Abstract

This paper analyses the postponement of first births of the 1990s compared to the 1980s, using panel data from four countries, namely, Germany (GSOEP), Great Britain (BHPS), the Netherlands (OSA) and Sweden (HUS). We find substantial postponement of maternity in all four countries for all educational groups with the most pronounced postponement among highly educated women. However the mean age of the mother at giving birth to the first child was the lowest in Great Britain both in the 1980s and 1990s.

Theoretically we can distinguish two motives for postponing maternity namely, the consumption-smoothing motive and the career-planning motive. in this paper we concentrate on an important determinant of the maternal time costs: the time spent out of market work.

We make use of longitudinal information about the number of months elapsed since first birth until the mother is observed working in the labour market. We estimate parametric duration models with Weibull distribution and obtain predicted months spent out of work since first birth.

We find that given mothers’ education level, for mothers who did not have a second birth within 36 months after first birth, on the one hand, mothers in Britain entered the labour market more quickly after their first birth in the 1990s compared to the 1980s. on the other hand, the German stayed at home longer in the 1990s than in the 1980s. We do not find a significant change in the time period Dutch and Swedish first-time mothers spent at home after birth between the 1980s and 1990s.