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...

In Italy the participation of women has not increased very much in the last few decades relative to other developed countries and it is still among the lowest in Europe. The female employment rate stands almost 13 percentage points below the EU average and 22 below the Lisbon target. One of the...

In this paper, we formulate a dynamic utility maximization model of female labor force participation and fertility choices and estimate approximate decision rules using data on married women in Italy, Spain and France. The pattern of estimated state dependence effects across countries is...

Two key issues in the literature on female labor supply are: (1) if persistence in employment status is due to unobserved heterogeneity or state dependence, and (2) if fertility is exogenous to labor supply. Until recently, the consensus was that unobserved heterogeneity is very important, and...

The analysis of the temporal and cross-country patterns of women’s labour market participation and fertility shows how several factors affect the compatibility between childrearing and work (labour market characteristics, social services, and family wealth). The most significant factors which...

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 aim to explore the impact of social policies and labour market characteristics on women’s decisions regarding working and having children, using data from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP). We estimate the two decisions jointly, including in the analysis, beyond...

In this paper we use newly available individual-level data from the Longitudinal Survey of Italian Households to investigate the factors affecting female labour force participation after the birth of the first child. We focus on the effects of pre-marital job characteristics and find that...

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...