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...

Aggregate evidence has revealed a significant increase in women’s labour market participation (especially among married women) and a decline in male participation, both in Italy and in all the other OECD countries. In this paper, we empirically test the relationship between the education and...

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...

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...

We formulate a model of household behavior in which cooperation is costly and in which these costs vary across households. Some households rationally decide to behave noncooperatively, which in our context is an e?cient outcome. An intriguing feature of the model is that, while the welfare of...

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...

Recent research reveals that divorce negatively impacts children’s welfare as a consequence of the reduction in monetary and time contributions of the non-custodial parent. When the custody arrangement is sole custody, the variables that link the absent parent to the child are visitations 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...