Fertility research has found that educational attainment is negatively related to childbearing; and, yet, recent studies suggest that it is weakening. Few studies examine how the educational gradient varies across institutional contexts.  The aim of this paper is to investigate the influence of labour market institutions and the impact of attitudinal change in shaping the relationship between education and childbearing.

Using ESS, EVS and WVS data for 2004-2009, we analyze the relationship between fertility quantum and relevant country-level factors that shape the opportunity cost of childbearing.

The multi-level results suggest that, overall, labour market policies have not a clear impact on the educational gradient while the diffusion of post-modernist attitudes and of new gender values appear as country-level variables with a significant effect. The incidence of public sector employment increases considerably the likelihood of first and higher order births while the opposite holds for the level of rigidity of EPL. However, these factors do not have any clear influence on the negative educational gradient of childbearing. In contrast, the diffusion of post-modernist attitudes as well the incidence of new gender values have a heterogeneous impact across educational strata and have relevant effects in shaping the educational gradient of fertility.