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...

The paper shows that parents’ education is an important, but hardly exclusive part of the common family background that generates positive correlation between the educational attainments of siblings from the same family. But the correlation between the educational attainments of parents and...

More educated parents are observed to have better educated children. From a policy point of view, however, it is important to distinguish between causation and selection. Previous research trying to control for unobserved heterogeneity has found conflicting results: in most cases, a strong...

High welfare dependency and poverty rate among lone mothers prompted a workfare reform of the Norwegian welfare system for lone parents: activity requirements were brought in, time limits imposed and benefit levels raised. To evaluate the reform we introduce an estimator that, unlike the much...

More educated parents are observed to have better educated children. From a policy point of view, however, it is important to distinguish between causation and simple selection. Researchers trying to control for unobserved ability have found conflicting results: in most cases, they have found a...

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...