Family, labour and fertility

Francesco Maura, Paola Profeta

We study the effect of (informal) care provision patterns on late-life access to economic resources among women using SHARE data. We find that the earnings drop among women who retired to take care of a relative are about twice the drop of women who retired for other reasons. Moreover, these effects are persistent for at least 7 years after retirement. This result sheds light on part of the unexplained lifetime earnings and the pension gender gap.

Kenza Elass

Recent explanations of the gender wage gap emphasize the role of gender differences in psychological traits. Nevertheless, there have been only a limited number of studies confirming the relevance of these factors for labor market outcomes. This presentation assesses the role of gender-specific preferences in the reservation wage gap during the job search. I use French administrative data from the unemployment insurance agency providing information on job search behavior and previous outcomes to assess which kind of occupations men and women apply for and the gap in their reservation wages. Employing text analysis, I build a novel dataset classifying occupations with respect to a number of characteristics and examine to which extent men and women differ in the occupation they are looking for. I document widespread gender differences in the occupation characteristics targeted by job seekers. Quantile decomposition methods allow me to document an unequal gap in reservation wage, intensifying along the distribution. After I adjust for occupation characteristics reflecting gender-biased preferences and household constraints, the unexplained part of the reservation wage gap is decreased by half. Investigating unemployment history and outcomes from previous interviews with firms, I do not find evidence of a female risk aversion to previous unemployment shocks or male overconfidence.

Mikkel Mertz, Maddalena Ronchi, Viola Salvestrini 

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 exploit idiosyncratic within-school, cross-cohort variation in early exposure to entrepreneurs, measured by the share of an adolescent’s peers whose parents are entrepreneurs at the end of compulsory school. Early exposure, particularly to the entrepreneur parents of female peers, encourages girls’ entry and tenure into this profession, while it has no impact on boys. This effect 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. Finally we find evidence in support of three main channels: (i) access to specific information; (ii) changes in aspirations and goals; (iii) increased consideration of entrepreneurship as a potential career. Together these results challenge the view that the most successful female entrepreneurs would enter this profession regardless of early exposure.

Caroline Coly 

Rej. & Resubmit at Labour Economics

State interventions to decrease the gender wage gap are often criticized for creating one-approach-for-all which may be inappropriate for the specific difficulties faced by each sector and firm. In this paper, I study a unique policy where French firms were mandated by law to negotiate agreements on gender equality with union representatives. I estimate the causal effect of the signature of such agreements on the wage gap and other measures of gender inequalities. Using a unique combination of administrative datasets, I exploit the staggered signature of agreements over the 2010-2013 period and find that the law had an effect on the signature of those agreements but did not alter the gender wage gap nor many other outcomes reflecting gender inequalities. The absence of gender-related changes can plausibly be explained by the lack of obligation of result in the law and by the weak oversight of agreements’ content.

Kenza Elass, Cecilia García-Peñalosa, Christian Schluter

CEPR Discussion Paper No. 19592

We examine the economic geography of gender wage gaps to understand the role that location plays in gender earning differences. Using panelised administrative data for the universe of French workers, our findings indicate that women benefit relatively more from density than men, with an urban wage premium (return to urban density) 48% higher than for men. We identify a number of factors that explain this gap, with a large share being explained by the structure of the local labour market, notably, the extent of occupational segregation. Another important factor is commuting patterns, while childcare availability plays only a moderate role.

Francesco Maura

Economic Letters (2026)

Retirement reduces personal income and may shift the balance of bargaining power between partners in elderly couples. Using data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, I show that male partners are significantly less likely to be the household financial respondent once they retire, while no significant change for “who has the final say” over major financial decisions. Overall, results suggest a decline of men control in everyday financial matters, but no significant reallocation of bargaining power for formal financial choices.

Kenza Elass

Labour Economics (2024) 

A vast literature on gender wage gaps has examined the importance of selection into employment. However, most analyses have focused only on female labour force participation and gaps at the median. The Great Recession questions this approach because of the major shift in male employment that it implied. This paper uses the methodology proposed by Arellano and Bonhomme (2017) to estimate a quantile selection model over the period 2007–2018. Using a tax and benefit microsimulation model, I compute an instrument capturing both male and female decisions to participate in the labour market: the potential out-of-work income. Since my instrument is crucially determined by the welfare state, I consider three countries with notably different benefit systems – the UK, France and Finland. My results imply different selection patterns across countries and a sizeable male selection in France and the UK. Correction for selection bias lowers the gender wage gap and reveals a substantial glass ceiling with different magnitudes. Findings suggest that disparities between these countries are driven by occupational segregation and public spending on families.

Marta Angelici, Giulia Savio 

CESifo Economic Studies (2024)

We use data from the European working condition survey to describe the frequency of housework activities by men and women before and after the COVID-19 pandemic in European countries. We find that, although women continue to spend more time than men in housework activities, men increase housework activities after the pandemic and the gender gaps narrow. The result is driven by countries initially characterized by larger gender gaps in housework activities.

Paola Profeta 

Chapter in Routledge Handbook on the Economics of Ageing (2023), Eds. David E. Bloom, Alfonso Sousa-Poza, Uwe Sunde

Marta Angelici, Paola Profeta 

Management Science (2023) 

Does removing constraints on the time and place of work benefit the utility of workers and firms? We design a randomized experiment of a sample of workers in a large Italian company; workers are randomly divided into a treated group that engages in flexible place and time of work (which we call “smart working”) one day per week for nine months and a control group that continues to work traditionally. By comparing the treated and control groups, we find causal evidence that the flexibility of smart working increases the productivity of workers. We estimate a decrease of one day of leave on average per month, and we exclude a significant decline in objective productivity in any month. We also find sizeable improvements in well-being and work–life balance, and we observe that men also increase the time dedicated to household and care activities.

Daniela del Boca,  Noemi Oggero,  Paola Profeta, Maria Cristina Rossi 

IZA Journal of Labor Economics (2022)

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a dramatic impact on families’ lives because of the increased demands of housework and childcare. Much of the additional burden has been shouldered by women. Yet, the rise in remote working also has the potential to increase paternal involvement in family life and thus to reduce gender role inequalities. This effect depends on the working arrangements of each partner, whether working remotely, at their usual workplace, or ceasing work altogether. Using two waves of an ad-hoc survey conducted in April and November 2020, we show that the time spent by women in domestic activities did not depend on their partners’ working arrangements. Conversely, men spent fewer hours helping with housework and home schooling when their partners were at home. Although men who worked remotely or did not work at all devoted more time to household activities during the second wave of COVID-19, the increased time they spent at home did not seem to lead to a reallocation of couples’ time.

Ester Fanelli, Paola Profeta 

Demography (2021)