The main goal of this paper is to estimate the preferences of the Italian society towards equity in order to verify whether preferences i) have changed across the years, and ii) can be related to specific sociodemographic characteristics. Introducing equity concerns in the implementation of...

In order to determine how much money is needed to make each household member as well off as they were before a change in living conditions, equivalence scales should be defined on the basis of individual rather than household welfare. This requires the knowledge of individual utilities that are...

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

In Italy the participation of women has not increased very much in the last few decades relative to other developed countries and it is still among the lowest in Europe. The female employment rate stands almost 13 percentage points below the EU average and 22 below the Lisbon target. One of the...

We study the joint impact of gender and marital status on financial decisions. First, we test the hypothesis that marriage represents - in a portfolio framework - a sort of safe asset, and that this effect is stronger for women. Controlling for a number of observable characteristics, we show...

We develop a simple model of household time allocation decisions under strong functional form assumptions regarding preferences and household production technology. We argue that the specification is general when allowing for unrestrictive forms of population heterogeneity in the parameters...

Conventional pension systems suffer from a design defect which makes them financially unsustainable, and a source of inefficiency for the economy as a whole. The paper outlines a second-best policy which includes a public pension system made up of two parallel schemes, a Bismarckian one allowing...

This works tests whether or not the introduction of divorce law changes the timing of marital search. Common sense suggests that rational agents should adjust to the divorce risk by increasing the average length of search spell, whereas the option value theory stresses the role played by...

Economic models of household behavior typically yield the prediction that increases in schooling levels and wage rates of married women lead to increases in their labor supply and reductions in fertility. In Italy, as well as in other Southern European countries, low labor market participation...

The paper deals with child labour in developing countries. We address a problem that has recently drawn much attention at the international level, that is, how to invest in women’s rights to advance the rights of both women and children. We study the problem from a new perspective. In our...