This paper explores newly available Italian data derived from a 1:90 sample of social security administrative records (INPS) to investigate gender differences in pay during the initial stages of a worker’s career. We find that a significant and growing pay differential between men and women...

This paper investigates a unique feature of the English educational system to estimate the causal effect of compulsory schooling on labour market outcomes. We examine school leaving rules that allow for discrete variation in exit dates by date of birth within school cohorts. This natural...

This paper asks whether the availability of breastfeeding facilities at the workplace helps to reconcile breastfeeding and work commitments. Using data from the 2005 UK Infant Feeding Survey, we model the joint probability to return to work and breastfeeding and analyse its association with the...

This paper provides a general formulation of the regression discontinuity (RD) design and shows its general applicability to many epidemiological problems. It then applies the RD method to estimate the e�ects of the 1995 pill scare in the UK, using individual birth records and aggregate...

Using large American and British survey data, this paper provides structural estimates of the production functions for birth weight and fetal growth. In addition to maternal smoking, we estimate the impact of when a mother stops work, which has not been considered in the literature. Mothers’...

The aim of this work is to explore the relationship between unemployment and fertility. The hypothesis we investigate is that unemployment affects fertility decisions by influencing individual`s expectations of future job opportunities and wage levels. A spell of unemployment may induce women to...

In this paper we investigate the existence of compensating wage differentials across seasonal and non seasonal jobs, which arise due to anticipated working time restrictions. We build on a theoretical model by Abowd and Ashenfelter (1981), which links the compensating wage differential to...

This paper investigates the effect of earnings and employment opportunities on pre-marital fertility. Using data from a sample of British women born in 1970, we estimate an independent competing risk harzard model of fertility and cohabitation decisions. Our results show that individual earnings...

This paper investigates the way in which job mobility contributes to the emergence of a gender wage gap in the Italian labour market. We show that men experience higher wage growth than women during the first 10 years of their career, and that this difference is particularly large when workers...

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