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 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 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...

We analyse the effects of motherhood on women's working career using WHIP, a database that records individual work histories together with childbearing events. In this paper, we model working women's labour supply after childbirth for explaining why some women exit the labour market after...

Over the last decade Italy has seen a strong increase in the number of workers on the border between self-employment and employment. Depending on the data source the “parasubordinati”, i.e. workers with a “contract of continuous collaboration” (collaborators) represented between 1.8%...

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...

Women’s participation in the labour market varies substantially across Europe. In Northern countries female participation is usually higher, while, as we move towards the South of Europe, more traditional household models are still predominant and women are more devoted to domestic than to...

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...