BACKGROUND It is increasingly acknowledged that not only gender equality, but also gender ideology plays a role in explaining fertility in advanced societies. In a micro perspective, the potential mismatch between gender equality (i.e. the actual sharing taking place in a couple) and gender...

This article investigates the relationship between educational attainment, in terms of both level and field of education, and the probability of being childless in Spain. Findings demonstrate that there is a significant difference in childlessness by education level among women aged 34-50, while...

The paper investigates the costs of waste disposal and recycling services by using a well-behaved Composite cost function model. Our estimates on a unique sample of more than 500 Italian municipalities highlight that the refuse collection technology exhibits constant returns to scale as well as...

The focus of the paper is to analyze the costs of solid waste collection by applying a well-behaved multi-product cost function model to a sample of more than 500 Italian municipalities. Beyond shedding light on the presence and on the extent of size (or scale) economies, our aim is to...

This paper analyses the effects of board composition on the behaviour and performance of a sample of 114 Italian local public utilities, for which information about 1630 directors during 1994-2004 has been collected. This period is particularly interesting because of the legal changes that...

Many microeconometric models of discrete labour supply include alternative-specific constants meant to account for (possibly besides other factors) the density or accessibility of particular types of jobs (e.g. parttime jobs vs. full-time jobs). The most common use of these models is the...

The purpose of this paper is to present an exercise where we identify optimal income tax rules according to various social welfare criteria, keeping fixed the total net tax revenue. Empirical applications of optimal taxation theory have typically adopted analytical expressions for the optimal...

There is some controversy in the field of household economics regarding the efficiency of household decisions. We make the point that a flexible specification of spousal preferences and the household production technology precludes the possibility of using revealed preference data on household...

This paper studies the dependence between coupled lives - both within and across generations - and its effects on prices of reversionary annuities in the presence of longevity risk. Longevity risk is represented via a stochastic mortality intensity. Dependence is modelled through copula...

We make the point that a flexible specification of spousal preferences and household production technology precludes the possibility of using revealed preference data on household time allocations to determine the manner in which spouses interact. Under strong, but standard, assumptions...