The role of employment uncertainty as a fertility driver has previously been studied with a limited set of constructs, leading to inconclusive results. We address this oversight by considering perceived stability of employment and perceived resilience to potential job loss as two key dimensions of employment uncertainty in relation to fertility decision-making. The present study relies on the 2017 Italian Trustlab survey and its employment uncertainty module. We find that perception of resilience to job loss is a powerful predictor of fertility intentions, whereas perception of employment stability has only a limited impact. The observed relationship between resilience and fertility intentions is robust to the inclusion of person-specific risk attitude and does not depend on the unemployment rate or the share of fixed-term contracts in the area of residence. We conclude that the notion of employment uncertainty includes distinct expectations towards the future, which should be considered separately to understand fertility decision-making.

Supplementary material for this article is available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/00324728.2021.1939406.

就业不确定性作为生育驱动因素的作用之前已经通过有限的一组结构进行了研究，导致了不确定的结果。我们通过将感知的就业稳定性和感知的潜在失业弹性视为与生育决策相关的就业不确定性的两个关键维度来解决这一监督问题。本研究依赖于 2017 年意大利 Trustlab 调查及其就业不确定性模块。我们发现，对失业弹性的认知是生育意愿的有力预测因素，而对就业稳定性的认知影响有限。观察到的韧性和生育意愿之间的关系对于包含特定个人的风险态度是稳健的，并且不取决于居住地区的失业率或定期合同的比例。我们的结论是，就业不确定性的概念包括对未来的不同预期，应单独考虑这些预期以理解生育决策。

本文的补充材料可从以下网址获取：https://doi.org/10.1080/00324728.2021.1939406。