Title: Female part-time work in the European Union : An empirical study based on the ECHP
Abstract: In this paper, the question of female part-time work in the EU is explored using cross-sectional and longitudinal data from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP). Our empirical study has two main objectives : first, to describe the labour market transitions of women working part-time and, second, in the case of mothers with young children, to identify the determinants of the choice between full-time work, part-time work and non- employment. In many countries, part-time employees, especially those working less than 20 hours per week, tend to be concentrated in low-skilled, low-paid jobs. Starting from this observation, in the first part of our study, we put the emphasis on the transition into full-time employment : Does the transition rate from part-time to full-time work vary from country to country ? What are the characteristics of female part-time workers who are more likely than others to move into full-time employment ? Rather than studying the subsequent changes in employ- ment status among a subsample of employees working part-time in a given year, we are interested in the (short- term) occupational trajectories of individuals who entered into part-time work in year t. Based on data from waves 1-7 (1994-2000) of the ECHP, this analysis of labour market transitions is carried out for all EU-15 countries except Sweden. In the second part of the study, attention is focused on the labour supply decisions of mothers with young children in each of the EU-15 member States. For these women, part-time work is more likely to be voluntary, i.e. chosen for family reasons, than involuntary. Here, we attempt to answer the following questions : Do the effects of individual and family characteristics on the part-time / full-time choice vary across EU countries ? To what extent can the differences observed in the impact of such factors be explained by the specificities of national family policies, regarding the reconciliation of work and family life ? To analyse the employment choices of mothers, we use a set of multinomial logit models. These models are estimated on data from the seventh wave (2000) of the ECHP.
Publication Year: 2004
Publication Date: 2004-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 1
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot