The growth in labour market participation among women with young children has raised concerns about its implications for child cognitive development. We estimate a model of the cognitive development process of children nested within an otherwise standard model of household behaviour. The...

Most econometric models of intrahousehold behavior assume that household decision making is efficient, i.e., utility realizations lie on the Pareto frontier. In this paper, we investigate this claim by adding a number of participation constraints to the household allocation problem. Short-run...

In Italy, as well as in other Southern European countries, low labor market participation rates of married women are observed together with low birth rates. Our proposed explanation for this apparent anomaly involves the Italian institutional structure, particularly as reflected in rigidities...