While several social, economic and financial indicators point to a growing convergence among European countries, striking differences still emerge in the timing of leaving home for adult children. In Southern countries (as Spain, Italy or Portugal) in 2001 more than 70 percent of young adults...

In this paper, we focus on the impact of early grandparents' care on child cognitive outcomes, in the short and medium term, using data from the Millennium Cohort Study (UK). Compared with children looked after in a formal care centre, children cared by grandparents (as well as parents) are...

This paper investigates the effects of public childcare availability in Italy on mothers' working status and children's scholastic achievements. We use a newly available dataset containing individual standardized test scores of pupils attending second grade of primary school in 2008-09 in...

While a large literature has focused on the impact of parental investments on child cognitive development, very little is known about the role of child's own investments. Information on how children invest their time separately from parents is probably little informative for babies and toddlers,...

The growth in labor market participation among women with young children has raised concerns about the potential negative impact of the mother's absence from home on child outcomes. Recent data show that mother's time spent with children has declined in the last decade, while the indicators of...

In this paper we utilize a model of household investments in the development of children to explore the impact of various transfer policies on the distribution of child outcomes. We develop a cost criterion that can be used to compare the cost effectiveness of unrestricted, restricted, and...

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...

The pattern of employment among men and women has changed remarkably over the past decades. While the employment rate of women has risen, that of men has continued to decline. Disproportionate growth in the participation in the labor market of women with highincome husbands has heightened...

Most econometric models of intrahousehold behavior assume that household decision-making is efficient, i.e., utility realizations lie on the Pareto frontier. In this paper we investigate this claim by adding a number of participation constraints to the household allocation problem. Short-run...