Employment/family relations in Europe: socio-economic foundations of women's behavior in Germany, Spain, France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

Summary A critical review of the foundations of microeconomic models of labor supply is first presented, which shows the inability of utilitarian approaches to capture the heterogeneity of the trade-offs made in job-family coordination. Against this line of argument, we suggest that these trade-offs vary according to the nature of the relationships valued by the spouses in the household, and imply alternative models of job-family coordination. We then argue that countries provide varying degrees of support for these different models through the institutions set up to regulate employment/family relations. Regime differences are identified describing the coherences established between certain models and types of policies, adapting for this purpose the typology of welfare state regimes identified by Esping-Andersen. Some hypotheses on the relationships between the family formation process and female labor supply to be observed in five European countries are examined in the last part of the thesis based on the "Labor Force Surveys".