Employment decisions of European women after childbirth

This paper describes and compares transitions into employment of mothers of newborn children in several European countries. Although female labour participation has increased everywhere, women are still likely to interrupt their career, when they have a child, for a period of time longer than the basic maternity leave. Using data from ECHP, we select women who have a child during the survey and we observe how long they take to start working. In order to estimate the factors which influence mothers’ decisions to work, we use a discrete time hazard model. Results show that women in different parts of Europe take different amounts of time which depend on their human capital and on parental leave arrangements. Highly educated women behave quite homogenously across countries so that the difference in post birth participation in Europe is given by differences in participation among the less educated women. Moreover, long parental leave seem to delay the return to work of low and medium educated women but they do not affect highly educated women’s