Educational Expansion and Changes in Entry into Marriage and Motherhood: the Experience of Italian Women

The increase of female education and, as a consequence, of the time a woman spends into the educational system, is expected to have an impact on the timing of the successive steps of her life cycle. The effect is direct, since she stays outside the marriage market longer, and indirect because the human capital of a better educated woman increases her expectations as far as the professional activity and the economic independence. This hypothesis is developed in the more general framework of the "New Home Economics" (Becker, 1981). To empirically assess this hypothesis we have analysed the life histories of a sample of Italian women from different cohorts, collected on the occasion of the National Survey on Family Structures and Behaviours carried on by the National Institute of Statistics (Istat, 1983). The mentioned effects have been estimated by fitting an exponential multivariate model to the probability to marry and to the probability to give birth to a first child at any age higher than 16. The results of this paper only partially agree with the initial hypothesis. The effect of the level of education is negative. That is, it increases the age of entry into marriage. However, the size of the effect is small and seems limited to the passage from youth to adulthood, because the longer time the woman spends in the educational system increases the age at which she feels herself ready to marry. As far as the timing of the first child, it is almost independent of educational attainment, once marital status is taken into account.