Working papers results

The paper analyses the impact of grandparenting on individuals' fertility behaviour using longitudinal data from eleven European countries. In particular, we focus on how siblings may share and compete for grandparents' time in terms of childcare. By considering different family scenarios, we show that availability of grandparenting play an important role in individuals' decision making for having children. Grandparenting is particularly important in the South of Europe where public childcare is limited and here we see a large impact of grandparenting on fertility.

In this paper we investigate the sensitivity of stochastic population forecasts produced by means of the Scaled Model of Error with respect to the choice of the correlation parameters. In particular, we evaluate the impact that a change in the specification of the correlation of the age-specific fertility forecast error increments across time and age and of the correlation of the age-specific mortality forecast error increments across time, age and sex has on the forecasts of the Total Fertility Rate and of the Male and Female Life Expectancies respectively. In our opinion a sensitivity analysis of this kind is extremely useful, since up to now the relevance and the impact of the choice of the Scaled Model of Error input parameters has not be discussed in detail. Such analysis will provide users with a better understanding of the model itself.

Using data from seven countries drawn from the Generations and Gender Survey, we study the relationship between informal childcare provided by grandparents and mothers' employment. The extent of formal childcare varies substantially across European countries and so does the role of grandparents in helping out rearing children. The extent of grandparenting also depends on their attitudes, which in turn relate to social norms and availability of public childcare, and hence the country context where individuals reside matters considerably. Within families, attitudes toward childcare are associated with attitudes towards women's working decisions. The fact that we do not observe these attitudes may bias the estimates. By using instrumental variable techniques we find that only in some countries mothers' employment is positively and significantly associated with grandparents providing childcare. In other countries, once we control for unobserved attitudes we do not find this effect.