This paper explores the effects of husbands' commuting time on their wives' labour market participation and on family time allocation. We develop a unitary family model of labour supply, which includes commuting times and household production. In a pure leisure model longer commuting time for...

We study how employed and self-employed workers living as a couple differ in terms of allocation of their time. In particular, we focus on the division of domestic work between men and women. It emerges that the type of job strongly affects the allocation of time of men, whereas it is much less...

A coincidence in time between the volatility break associated with the "Great Moderation" and large changes in the pattern of conditional and unconditional correlations between output, hours and labor productivity was detected by Gal� and Gambetti (2009). We provide a novel explanation for...

The negative association between fertility and female labour market participation is complicated by the endogeneity of fertility. We address this problem by using an exogenous variation in family size caused by infertility shocks, mainly related to the fact that nature prevents some women from...

Women�s labor force participation is lowest in Italy among the OECD countries. Moreover, the participation rate of married women is positively correlated with their husbands' income. We show that high tax rates together with tax credits and transfers raise the burden for two-earner...

The aim of the paper is to characterize the optimal child care policies (subsidies and state provision), assuming that child care provision affects the child�s future abilities. Public intervention is needed since two sources of economic inefficiency are contemporaneously influential:...

We analyse how accounting for household production could affect labour market statistics. This topic has grown in importance since the release of the new System of National Accounts in 2008. Because the traditional headcount ratios focussing on the number of people carrying out some home and...

We use the last two waves of the Italian Time Use Survey to analyse the intergenerational transmission of reading habits. This can be explained by both cultural and educational transfers from parents to children and by imitative behaviour. Imitation is of particular interest, since it suggests...

Activity and employment rates for immigrant women in many industrialized countries display a great variability across national groups. The aim of this paper is to assess whether this well-known fact is due to a voluntary decision (i.e. large reservation wages by the immigrants) or to an...

In this paper we examine whether and how the inflow of female immigrants who �specialize� in household production affects the labor supply of Italian women. To identify the causal effect, we exploit the family reunification motive and the network effects - i.e. the tendency of newly...