Research has documented that economic downturns increase the risk of pregnancy loss. However, previous work on has not addressed the influence of in utero exposure to job loss with high-quality individual data. We draw on 'Understanding Society' (UKHLS, sweeps 1-11, 2009-2020), which contains a...

Research has documented that economic downturns increase the risk of pregnancy loss. However, previous work on has not addressed the influence of in utero exposure to job loss with high-quality individual data. We draw on 'Understanding Society' (UKHLS, sweeps 1-11, 2009-2020), which contains a...

Propensity Score Matching (PSM) has become a popular approach to estimation of causal effects. It relies on the assumption that selection into a treatment can be explained purely in terms of observable characteristics (the “unconfoundedness assumption”) and on the property that balancing on...

The aim of this paper is to assess the quality of the ranking of institutions obtained with multilevel techniques in presence of different model misspecifications and data structures. Through a Monte Carlo simulation study, we find that it is quite hard to obtain a reliable ranking of the whole...

We consider policy evaluations when SUTVA is violated because of the presence of interference among units. We propose to explicitly model interactions as a function of units characteristics. Our approach is applied to the evaluation of a policy implemented in Tuscany (a region in Italy) on small...

The paper investigates the role of multi-level structures in poverty analysis based on household level data. We demonstrate how multi-level models can be applied to standard poverty analysis and highlight its usefulness in terms of assessing the extent community characteristics matter in...

Estimating the effects of demographic events on households living standards introduces a range of statistical issues. In this paper we analyze this topic considering our observational study as a quasi-experiment in which the treatment is expressed by childbearing events between two time points...

In the traditional models of female labour supply formal childcare is assumed to be provided by the market. This is not the case in most European countries. In this paper we estimate the causal effect of a particular kind of informal care, the one provided by grandparents, on mothers' work...

Childcare arrangements are key in women's ability to juggle motherhood and working outside the home. As such, the study of the access to childcare and its use is of great policy relevance. We focus on a particular kind of informal childcare, the one provided by grandparents. Empirically,...