Regional Context and Fertility in Contemporary Italy

Our motivation in this paper comes from a growing concern in demography for a better understanding of context in reproductive behavior outcomes. This takes on particular importance in Italy, a country still characterized by very low fertility. We exploit detailed life history calendar data for a large, nationally representative sample of Italian women, and we conduct a more refined analysis of the relationship between personal traits, regional context and fertility. After introducing the Italian setting, the descriptive analysis verifies the persistence of significant differences in the reproductive behavior of women according to region of origin. Our multivariate analysis tests for the influence of women’s employment, union status, region of origin, and other standard traits on the annual probability of first and second birth. Our results point to very strong effects of a woman’s own employment (and weaker effects of her regional context) on first and second birth. We also find that more secular unions are associated with lower rates of first birth, and that more secular regional contexts are associated with lower rates of transition to first birth. Advocates of several competing explanations of very low fertility will find items of support in these results.