This paper explores the effects of husbands' commuting time on their wives' labour market participation and on family time allocation. We develop a unitary family model of labour supply, which includes commuting times and household production. In a pure leisure model longer commuting time for...

Women�s labor force participation is lowest in Italy among the OECD countries. Moreover, the participation rate of married women is positively correlated with their husbands' income. We show that high tax rates together with tax credits and transfers raise the burden for two-earner...

We study how employed and self-employed workers living as a couple differ in terms of allocation of their time. In particular, we focus on the division of domestic work between men and women. It emerges that the type of job strongly affects the allocation of time of men, whereas it is much less...

The volume collects the essays presented at the 15th Workshop on Public Finance organised by Banca d'Italia in Perugia from 4 to 6 April 2013. The workshop focused on the link between fiscal policy and macroeconomic imbalances and comprised four sessions. The first session concentrated on the...

In the absence of any correlation between wealth and entrepreneurial talent, initial net wealth should have an explanatory power in the decision to become an entrepreneur only for households that are financially constrained; further, its importance should decrease with wealth. I test these...

Poverty is generally defined as income or expenditure insufficiency, but the economic condition of a household also depends on its real and financial asset holdings. This paper investigates measures of poverty that rely on indicators of household net worth. We review and assess two main...

The paper provides an econometric analysis of the aggregate saving function of Italian households in the vein of the life cycle theory. Results from an ECM representation based on yearly data for 1951-1998 point to depressive effects on private consumption of recent reforms of social security,...

The aim of the paper is to characterize the optimal child care policies (subsidies and state provision), assuming that child care provision affects the child�s future abilities. Public intervention is needed since two sources of economic inefficiency are contemporaneously influential:...

We use the last two waves of the Italian Time Use Survey to analyse the intergenerational transmission of reading habits. This can be explained by both cultural and educational transfers from parents to children and by imitative behaviour. Imitation is of particular interest, since it suggests...

We analyse how accounting for household production could affect labour market statistics. This topic has grown in importance since the release of the new System of National Accounts in 2008. Because the traditional headcount ratios focussing on the number of people carrying out some home and...