We analyse gender wage inequalities in Italy in the mid-1990s and in the mid-2000s. In this period important labour market developments occurred: institutional changes have loosened the use of flexible and atypical contracts; the female employment rates and educational levels have substantially...

This paper studies the gender wage gap by educational attainment in Italy using the 1994-2001 ECHP data. We estimate wage distributions in the presence of covariates and sample selection separately for highly and low educated men and women. Then, we decompose the gender wage gap across all the...

Sizeable gender differences in employment rates are observed in many countries. Sample selection into the workforce might therefore be a relevant issue when estimating gender wage gaps. This paper proposes a new semi-parametric estimator of densities in the presence of covariates which...

From the point of view of workplace safety, it is important to know whether having a temporary job has an effect on the severity of workplace accidents. We present an empirical analysis on the severity of workplace accidents by type of contract. We used micro data collected by the Italian...

In 2007 the Italian central government started a program by transferring funds to regional governments to develop both private and public early childcare services. Exploiting the different timing of program implementation across regions, we evaluate its effectiveness in boosting the public...

A large part of the recent literature on program evaluation has focused on estimation of the average effect of the treatment under assumptions of unconfoundedness or ignorability following the seminal work by Rubin (1974) and Rosenbaum and Rubin (1983). In many cases however, researchers are...

Matching estimators are widely used in statistical data analysis. However, the distribution of matching estimators has been derived only for particular cases (Abadie and Imbens, 2006). This article establishes a martingale representation for matching estimators. This representation allows the...

There is a large theoretical literature on methods for estimating causal effects under unconfoundedness, exogeneity, or selection-on-observables type assumptions using matching or propensity score methods. Much of this literature is highly technical and has not made inroads into empirical...

We analyse how the financial support for long-term elderly care affects the level of household savings. Using a difference-in-differences estimator, we investigate the 2002 Scottish reform, which introduced free formal personal care for all the elderly aged 65 and above residing in Scotland. Our...

Estimation of average treatment effects under unconfoundedness or exogenous treatment assignment is often hampered by lack of overlap in the covariate distributions. This lack of overlap can lead to imprecise estimates and can make commonly used estimators sensitive to the choice of...