Legal separation is a crucial step in the dissolving of marriages in Italy. Marriage and legal separation data come from administrative data sources and have been part of the civil registration and vital statistics system for a long time. These data make it possible to constantly monitor evolution of marital unions formation and dissolution over time and space. This study highlights the potential of combining administrative data at a macro level, aggregated by selected characteristics of the marriage and of the spouses. Data collection on legal separations is a complex process that brings together records from different administrative sources that have different transmission procedures. The system has rapidly evolved in recent years because of important normative changes. Pooling the two exhaustive data sources on marriages and separations we calculate duration-specific separation rates by selected spouses’ and wedding characteristics and estimate survival curves for 1975 marriage cohorts onward. Although the propensity to separate is increasing across marriage cohorts, the most recent first-marriage cohorts—those celebrated since the beginning of the new millennium—show a decreasing tendency to separate after short marriage durations. The most fragile unions are those celebrated in a civil ceremony in the north of Italy and that choose the separation of property regime. Couples in which the bride is more educated than the groom show a higher risk of separating. Differences by geographical area and celebration rite tend to reduce over time. This study contributes to existing information about the propensity to separate in Italy and the role that some characteristics of weddings and spouses play. It shows the potential for integrating information from marriage and separation registers when dealing with a relatively rare phenomenon at the population level and with information not usually collected in social surveys.
This article builds on microdata from the Birth Sample Survey (BSS) carried out by Istat in 2005 and 2012 in order to analyse changes in the occupational status of mothers of young children. We aim in particular to broaden the understanding of the individual and contextual characteristics that can affect the probability of women who were employed during pregnancy of not returning to work in the two years following the child’s birth. The study contributes to existing literature on mothers’ employment in two main ways. First, we take into consideration the different nature - voluntary or involuntary – of the motivations for not returning to work. Second, we attempt to evaluate whether the likelihood of Italian mothers to leave or lose their jobs and the factors affecting these probabilities changed between 2005 and 2012. Our results confirm human capital investments and job characteristics to be among the main determinants of women’s employment continuity after childbearing. The probability of losing a job increased significantly for mothers in 2012 compared to 2005, probably as a result of the deterioration of labour market conditions during the recession years. Conversely, the probability of leaving a job was not statistically significantly related to the year; family characteristics - the presence of a couple and features of the partner’s job - were key factors in women’s deciding not to return to work after childbearing.
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