TITLE:
Does the Month of Birth Influence the Timing of Life Course Decisions? Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Italy
AUTHORS:
Laura Cavalli
KEYWORDS:
Education; Marriage; First Birth; Natural Experiment; Kaplan-Meier Estimate; Cox Hazard Model; Logit Regression Model
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.2 No.1,
January
8,
2014
ABSTRACT: Social scientists have observed for a long
time a negative relationship between the time spent on education and the timing of family
formation. Using data from the I.D.E.A. survey (2003), a birth-month experiment
on a sample of 3000 young Italian adults is employed in order to explore
whether a different month of birth leads to regular differences in life course
decisions of young Italians. The results suggest that the “social” age, as
determined by the school cohort, rather than the biological age, is an
important determinant of the timing of demographic events during the transition
to adulthood.