71st International Atlantic Economic Conference

March 16 - 19, 2011 | Athens, Greece

Modelling the Processes of Job Activity and Family Formation

Friday, 18 March 2011: 18:20
Joanna Landmesser, Ph.D. , Econometrics and Statistics, Warsaw University of Life Sciences, Warszawa, Poland
The aim of the paper is to analyze the relationships between events of two careers: family and employment career. To investigate whether women postpone childbearing we estimate the hazard models describing the transitions to childbirth and entry to and exit from employment. We would like to answer the questions: Does women s rising career investment lead to decline in motherhood? Does employment function as a barrier to have children?

The parametric and semiparametric analysis methods were used, including the method of competing risks. The models make it possible to measure joint impact of many variables on the intensity of a given process, e.g. intensity of the first and second childbirth. In order to analyze fertility and employment jointly, we also model the dependence structure among duration of time a woman remains childless and duration of employment or unemployment using copula approach. Based on models of the marginal distributions a bivariate survival function will be modeled.

To estimate the models, we use data from the Employment, Family and Education Survey conducted in Poland in 2006 and data from labor offices in Poland.