The generalized and relatively homogeneous fertility decline across European countries in the aftermath of the Great Recession poses serious challenges to our knowledge of contemporary low fertility patterns. In this paper, we argue that fertility decisions are not a mere “statistical shadow of the past”, and advance the Narrative Framework, a new approach to the relationship between economic uncertainty and fertility. This framework proffers that individuals act according to or despite uncertainty based on their “narrative of the future” – imagined futures embedded in social elements and their interactions. We also posit that personal narratives of the future are shaped by the “shared narratives” produced by socialization agents, including parents and peers, as well as by the narratives produced by the media and other powerful opinion formers. Finally, within this framework, we propose several empirical strategies, from both a qualitative and a quantitative perspective, including an experimental approach, for assessing the role of narratives of the future in fertility decisions.

Understanding the relationship between economic and fertility trends is a challenge for demographic research. Karaman Örsal and Goldstein (2018) took a large group of middle-high income countries and looked at the relevant data from the postwar period onwards. They showed that, since 1970, good economic conditions have led to higher fertility, while bad economic conditions mean lower fertility, suggesting a pro-cyclical trend (see also Myrskylä et al. 2009). However, a close look at the demographic trends at the beginning of the twenty-first century casts doubts on this kind of interpretation. Economic indicators suggest that European countries are currently moving out of the Great Recession, whereas fertility trends are not so positive. For instance, in 2009 Northern European economies resumed economic growth, but their total fertility started to decrease substantially. In Norway, total fertility dropped from 1.98 in 2009 to 1.6 in 2018, the lowest ever in peacetime; similar changes, and even lower fertility levels, have been observed in Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Sweden (Comolli et al. 2019). On the other side of Europe, Mediterranean countries such as Italy, Greece and Spain, after a period of fertility rebound, re-entered, in the same period, a regime of lowest-low fertility, with total fertility around 1.3.

The international literature hypothesized a "U-shaped" pattern of immigrants' occupational trajectories from origin to destination countries due to the imperfect transferability of human capital. However, empirical evidence supporting this hypothesis is available only in single-country studies and for "old," Anglo-Saxon migration countries with deregulated labor markets. This article compares Italy, Spain, and France, providing evidence that the more segmented the labor market, the higher immigrants' occupational downgrade on arrival, independently from skills transferability and other individual characteristics. Paradoxically, the more segmented the labor market, the more important the acquisition of host-country specific human capital for subsequent upward mobility.

The Second Demographic Transition (SDT) theory underlines the importance of changing values and attitudes to explain the trend toward low fertility and raising female labour market participation. We contribute to this debate comparing religiosity and gender attitudes over several European countries using three waves of the European Values Study (1990, 1999 and 2008). By dealing with the issues of measurement invariance and endogeneity between values and behaviour, our results support some critiques of the SDT theory. The pace of the process of sociocultural change has not been the same across European countries and the forerunners of the SDT, that is, the most secularized and gender-egalitarian societies, now have the highest female labour market participation rates and the highest fertility. We provide evidence for a 'macro-micro paradox' regarding the role of values on family behaviours. Religiosity is positively correlated with fertility and housewifery, while gender attitudes are only correlated with women's labour market decisions. These correlations are stronger in more traditional countries, even if aggregate fertility is lower. We stress the necessity to integrate cultural and structural explanations, suggesting the lack of family policies and the rigidity of the family formation process as possible mechanisms to unravel this paradox.

This work aims to bring together two research fields: the debate concerning different labor market flexibilization strategies and the determinants of training chances. The purpose of our work is therefore to assess the trade-off between temporary employment and training opportunities in a comparative analysis of three groups of countries characterized by different levels of labour market segmentation and training coverage. Particular attention is paid to the impact of the 2008 economic downturn in shaping training opportunities for contingent workers. In this study, we do not distinguish neither the type of training carried out (specific versus general), which depends on the (in)transferability of the acquired skills for a subsequent job, nor between firm-sponsored and self-funded training. Anyway, the distinction between alternative forms of training is rarely well operationalizable and our data does not exempt; moreover, the empirical evidence indicates that specific training is far less common than the general one and that, in most cases, training activities of both types are paid by employers. If not provided by the firm, the human capital investment paid directly by employees does not compensate the lacking of financed training opportunities. We assume that the decision to invest in training is inscribable in a utility maximizing framework both for the employers and the employees, in terms of expected returns (productivity on one side, wage and career prospects on the other). In such a cost-benefit framework, if the payback period is short, firms will have poor incentives to invest in the workforce training. Consequently, there is empirical evidence of underinvestment in training activities for part-time and even more for temporary workers , with likely negative implications in terms of productivity and career prospects for that part of the workforce less attached to the labour market. If the short payback period is the mechanism responsible for the FTC training penalty, it can be argued, from a theoretical perspective, that this mechanism should be exacerbated in those circumstances that lower the stability of the employment relation (in terms of unemployment risks) for temporary workers, i.e., (i) in highly segmented labour markets, where repeated experiences of unemployment-temporary work are common, or (ii) during negative economic conjunctures. Starting from the former, there is in fact enough empirical evidence of a negative relation between FTCs and training in different labour markets, but mainly based on single-nation studies The aim of this article is not only to address the question of the relation between temporary employment and training chances per se, but to detect, if any, the distribution of training retrenchment among different kind of workers in response to a negative economic conjuncture. Generally speaking, the question whether training is pro-or counter-cyclical is still highly debated, even if results seem to confirm a positive relation between economic downturns and training. Based on...