The unequal childbearing response to labor market uncertainty in Europe: the role of social location, between macro and micro effects

The study proposes a novel perspective in analyzing the nexus between labor market uncertainty and childbearing behavior, namely the full consideration of the meso-level, or social location. We claim that a comprehensive understanding of the role of employment uncertainty must include, together with the more traditional micro- and macro-levels, the social location’s exposure to uncertainty. We use the 2004–2023 rounds of the European Social Survey (ESS) to investigate the association between the employment uncertainty experienced by the respondents through their social location (i.e., unemployment in their ascribed reference group) and national context (i.e., country annual unemployment rate), net of and in interaction with the labor market uncertainty experienced by them at the individual level. We run separate analyses for men and women, and we investigate whether and how this process depends on the respondents’ socioeconomic status. Our findings show that, per se, the employment uncertainty experienced in one’s social location and country context is not substantially associated with the probability of having a child; on the other hand, as unemployment rates increase in the social location or country, the likelihood of having a child declines among individuals who never experienced labor market uncertainty, making them more similar to those who did experience personally some degree of uncertainty.