The importance parents give to time spent with their children for their future behavioural and cognitive development deeply affected the patterns of time allocation of both working and non-working parents in all developed countries in the last decades. We compare the two existing waves of the...

The paper deals with child labour in developing countries. We address a problem that has recently drawn much attention at the international level, that is, how to invest in women’s rights to advance the rights of both women and children. We study the problem from a new perspective. In our...

The paper deals with female employment in developing countries. We set out a model to test our argument that, at the first stage of development, demographic and health programs have proven to be more effective for women’s position in the society than specific labour and income support...

The effect of transition from centrally planned to market economies on female employment is unclear a-priori. Many studies have pointed out that the emergence of labour markets created obstacles to but also new opportunities for women’s employment. A frequently mentioned explanation of the...

We analyze a mechanism that has been disregarded in the literature on parental investment in children, as little attention has been devoted to the choices made by children themselves. We model directly time use by youngsters into activities related to the acquisition of human capital,...

According to the agenda for employment set by the EU in 2000 for the following ten years, the target for female employment was set at 60 per cent for the year 2010. While Northern and most Continental countries have achieved this quantitative target, the Mediterranean countries are lagging...

Economic models of household behavior typically yield the prediction that increases in schooling levels and wage rates of married women lead to increases in their labor supply and reductions in fertility. In Italy, as well as in other Southern European countries, low labor market participation...

In this paper we focus in particular on the participation of women with children, considering the peculiar characteristics of the Italian labour market, the social service system as well as the legislation regarding maternity leave, which have jointly constrained the possibility for women to...

In this paper we present important empirical evidence regarding recent trends in women’s participation and fertility in European countries, and provide several interpretations of the differences across countries. Several recent analyses have considered labour supply and fertility as a joint...

In this paper, we examine whether the imperfections in the credit market spill over to the labor market. We examine the case of a country that experienced a very high degree of imperfections in the financial markets, but underwent substantial changes in 1992 due to the liberalization brought by...