privately organized early child care before being enrolled in compulsory education (Aran ad RidaoCano, 2013).

Many couples seem thus at risk of deciding against child arrival in Turkey as they face institutional barriers for starting and enlarging a family while maintaining family income. Our descriptive as well as econometric analysis sheds light on the question what kind of family is most at risk of showing such behavior.

# **3. Descriptive overview of fertility and female employment in Turkey**

# _Fertility_

In Turkey, total fertility rates declined drastically in the last decades. They fell from over 6 children per woman in the year 1960 to 2.08 children in the year 2011 and therewith rapidly converged to the EU (26)<sup>1</sup> average, which fell from 2.7 in 1960 to 1.8 children per woman in 2011 (World Bank World Development Indicators, 2014).

As total fertility rates, completed fertility rates are declining over time – an information we get by combining census with survey data.

Census data<sup>2</sup> provide unbiased measures of completed fertility for cohorts 1910 to 1950 (women who are at least age 50 years in the 2000 and have thus completed their childbearing period). We nevertheless report census data until cohort 1960 (women aged 40 observed in 2000), acknowledging that this measure risks to be somewhat downward biased as a minority of Turkish women aged 40 have not yet completed their childbearing period.

The latest available wave for Turkey is 2000. In order to obtain more recent information about completed fertility, we complement the census data with survey data. For this purpose, we use wave 2011 of the cross sectional module of the European Survey of Income and Living Conditions (SILC) for Turkey.

The main advantage of this survey is the availability of detailed information about education, labor market participation and income – variables which are collected not only on a household but also on an individual level and which will be used in the latter empirical analysis. This information is rarely available in other, more ‘demographic’ surveys. Some pitfalls emerge, however, due to the fact that the SILC does not report information on the number of children directly. However, children are observed with a proper identification number when living in their parents’ households, and households are followed when moving. Nevertheless, we do not know whether the children living at their parents’ household are biological or not. We therefore drop households with children whose age difference to their mothers is smaller than 15 years. We also do not observe children when they live with the parent’s ex-partner or when they already moved out. Therefore, there is a risk of downward bias of observed fertility for women who are at the end of their childbearing age and who have had their children quite early. We actually observe that the weighted mean of women’s age-specific number of children is decreasing after the age of 42 in the SILC cross section wave of 2011 for Turkey. To limit this downward

> 1 In this paper, the EU average always refers to the arithmetic mean of 26 European countries: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain , Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom.

> 2 General Population Census (5 Percent sampling) for 1980, 1985 and 2000 provided by the Turkish Statistical Institute; Census data also provided by i‐pums.

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