The relationship between education and fertility in the presence of a time varying frailty component

Abstract

The paper investigates the relationship between fertility and women's education in Italy, using data from the 2009 Household Multipurpose Survey of Family and Social Subjects. We use event history models, adopting a Bayesian approach for inference to study the association between fertility and women's education in the presence of a time varying unobserved component. Our analysis shows that either disregarding the unobserved component or assuming a time constant unobserved heterogeneity can lead to misleading results, at least in the context studied.