Introduction

In this chapter, we explore the impact of social policies on the joint decisions of women's labour market participation and fertility and on wages. We use the European Community Household Panel (ECHP), a longitudinal survey coordinated and supported by Eurostat. The survey involves a representative sample of households and individuals interviewed for eight years (1994–2001) in each of the fifteen European Union (EU) Member States existing at that time. The standardised methodology and procedure in data collection yield comparable information across countries, making the ECHP a unique source of information for cross-country analyses at the European level. The aim of the survey, in fact, is to provide comparable information on the EU population, representative at both the longitudinal and the crosswise level. The data collected cover a wide range of topics on living conditions (income, employment, poverty and social exclusion, housing, health, migration and other social indicators). Therefore, the ECHP survey allows us to make analyses of how individuals and households experience change in their socio-economic environment and how they respond to such changes, and analyses of how conditions, life events, behaviour and values are linked to each other dynamically over time.

This empirical chapter is organised as follows: section 8.2 contains an empirical analysis of the simultaneous women's choice of working and having children in which the results of different specifications are presented and compared. In section 8.3 an empirical analysis of women's wages determinants is presented. Section 8.4 concludes.