Family, labour and fertility

Elass, K, C García-Peñalosa and C Schluter (2024)

Published in CEPR Discussion Paper No. 19592 (2024)

Viola Salvestrini with M. Mertz and M. Ronchi

Key points:

This paper shows that exposure to entrepreneurs during adolescence increases women's entry and performance in entrepreneurship and improves the allocation of talent in the economy.
Using population-wide registry data from Denmark, we track nearly one million individuals from adolescents to adulthood and exploit idiosyncratic within-school, cross-cohort variation in exposure to entrepreneurs, as measured by the share of an adolescent's peers whose parents are entrepreneurs at the end of compulsory school.
Early exposure, and in particular exposure to the entrepreneur parents of female peers, encourages girls' entry and tenure into this profession, while it has no effect on boys. The increase in female entrepreneurship is associated with the creation of successful and female-friendly firms.
Furthermore, early exposure reduces women's probability to discontinue education at the end of compulsory school and to hold low wage jobs through their lives.

Partners’ Risk Perception and Household Portfolio Allocation

Francesco Maura

Key points:

Classical models approximate household’s preferences with husbands (or financial decision-makers) preference in financial choices.
However, households make decisions as a group, bargaining about individual preferences and then deciding the optimal outcome.
I show that the preferences of all household decision-makers matter in the determination of household decisions, including that of wives.
I also show that approximating household members’ bargaining power using only relative income leads to a potential underestimation of the role of women in portfolio allocation.

Women's Caring Penalty at Retirement in Europe

Francesco Maura with Paola Profeta

Key points:

As population ages, there is an increasing demand for caregiving services and household decide whether purchase these services or produce them.
In the second case, one working member should retire or leave his/her job, in most cases a woman.
We study the impact of retirement due to caregiving responsibilities on women's post-retirement earnings compare to regular retirement.
The results show that the (negative) effect of retirement among those who retire because of caregiving duties is almost three times larger than the impact on regular retirees.

Generative AI and Labor Market Discrimination

Kenza Elass

What do women want in a job? Gender-biased preferences and the reservation wage gap

Kenza Elass

Key points:

This paper uses French administrative data from the French Unemployment Services providing information on job search behaviour to assess which kind of occupations men and women apply for and the gap in their reservation wages.
There are widespread gender differences in the occupation characteristics targeted by job seekers, both in terms of content and amenities of the desired occupation.
Using a change in childcare benefits for single parents in a causal analysis, results show that a change in household constraints changes the job search behaviour of women.

Kenza Elass

Published in Labour Economics (2024)

Who cares about childcare? Evidence from the Covid-19 pandemic

Paola Profeta with A. Marchese and G. Savio

Key points:

Compares public expenditures in Italian municipalities below 500 inhabitants run by a male and a female mayor
Using close races gender mixed elections it shows that before the Covid-19 pandemic female mayors were spending more in childcare than male mayors
However, during and after the pandemic this difference disappears, as men increase their spending in childcare

Family culture and childcare: Individual Preferences and Politicians’ Legislative Behavior

Paola Profeta with F. Carta and L. de Masi

Key points:

Studies the role of family organization in shaping public provision of childcare
US citizens with origins in countries characterized by egalitarian inheritance rules prefer a large childcare system, while those coming from large and cohabiting families rely less on the government and as a provider for external childcare
Representatives of US districts where these backgrounds are dominant are respectively more and less prone to vote for childcare interventions, independently of their own background