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BACKGROUND The vast majority of demographic studies have approached and operationalised the notion of economic uncertainty using snapshot indicators. Hence, the complexity and diversity of individuals' employment careers were largely hidden. We posit that the persistence of joblessness-that is, repeated and close spells of joblessness-represents a crucial marker of economic uncertainty in the realm of fertility (intention) research. OBJECTIVE We aim to explore the association between persistent joblessness of both members of the couple and women's fertility intentions among those who entered employment at least once in the last five years. METHODS We develop an index of persistent joblessness that simultaneously considers individual and contextual labour market conditions. It accounts for the severity of the experience of joblessness, the chances that an individual will escape joblessness, the alleviating effects of the years spent in continuous employment, and the recentness of any joblessness experience. This index is operationalized for Italy by consulting the 2009 Family and Social Subjects Survey. We verify the association between the index and women's fertility intentions among Italian couples, net of a series of confounders. RESULTS Our findings show that the higher the level of persistent joblessness, the lower a woman's fertility intentions. Within couples, we found a gendered association between joblessness and fertility intentions: His joblessness, more than hers, seems to play the decisive role in inhibiting a woman's fertility intentions.

BACKGROUNDIt is increasingly acknowledged that not only gender equality but also gender ideology plays a role in explaining fertility in advanced societies. In a micro perspective, the potential mismatch between gender equality (i.e., the actual sharing taking place in a couple) and gender ideology (i.e., attitudes and beliefs regarding gender roles) may drive childbearing decisions. OBJECTIVEThis paper assesses the impact of consistency between gender equality in attitudes and equality in the division of household labour on the likelihood of having another child, for different parities. METHODSRelying on two-wave panel data of the Bulgarian, Czech, French, Hungarian, and Lithuanian Generations and Gender Surveys, we build a couple typology defined by gender attitudes and housework-sharing. The typology identifies four types of couple: 1) gender-unequal attitudes and gender-unequal housework-sharing; 2) gender-equal attitudes and gender-unequal housework-sharing; 3) gender-unequal attitudes and gender-equal housework-sharing; 4) gender-equal attitudes and gender-equal RESULTSThe impact of the typology varies with parity and gender: taking as reference category the case of gender-equal attitudes and gender-equal division of housework, the effect of all the other couple types on a new childbirth is strong and negative for the second child and female respondents. CONCLUSIONSThe consistency between gender ideology and actual partners' housework-sharing is only favourable for childbearing as long as there is gender equality in both the dimensions.

Traditional measures of the persistence of poverty do not devote enough attention to the sequence of spells of poverty. We propose a new class of indices which measures the severity of chronic poverty, taking into account the way in which spells of poverty and non-poverty follow one another along individual life courses. All the years spent in poverty concur with the measurement of the persistency of poverty, albeit with a decreasing contribution provided that the distance between two consecutive spells of poverty becomes longer. Moreover, the distance from the poverty line and the poverty persistence probabilities are explicitly taken into account. A macrolevel index, which allows comparisons across nations and accounts for the mobility in the national income distributions, is also provided and it is used to explain the differentials of persistence of poverty among young European adults.

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