We study whether, alongside with an explicit tracking system separating students in general versus vocational curricula typically observed in European countries, the Italian highly centralized public schooling is also characterised by an implicit tracking system — typical of the US...

A wide range of sociological and psychological studies have shown that children have different cognitive and behavioural outcomes depending on whether they grow up in intact or non-intact families. These gaps may be attributable to differences in the amounts of time and money parents invest in...

We study the university choice of prospective students using a unique dataset enriched with "lab-in-the-field" experiments aimed at eliciting risk and time preferences of students. Controlling for assortative mating, we find that father's rather than mother's education is significantly...

Social inclusion is a multidimensional phenomenon that involves social, political, and economic aspects of individuals' life. While social inclusion is a priority of the European Agenda 2020, little is known about individuals' preferences for social inclusion and its relationship with altruism....

We investigate the determinants of the education gender gap in Italy in historical perspective with a focus on the influence of family structure. We capture the latter with two indicators: residential habits (nuclear vs. complex families) and inheritance rules (partition vs. primogeniture)....

In this paper, we focus on the impact of early grandparents’ care on child cognitive outcomes, in the short and medium term, using data from the Millennium Cohort Study (UK). Compared with children looked after in a formal care centre, children cared by grandparents (as well as parents)...

Lone mothers are overrepresented among the poor in many European countries, with detrimental consequences for them and their children. Even in Norway, which is known for its successful economic and welfare development, lone mothers were at least three times more likely to be poor than married...

The early contributions to the economic literature on this sub- ject assume that only market goods yield utility, and that the only way adults can secure the consumption of these goods in old age is by saving. More recent contributions recognize that the elderly derive utility also from the care...

This paper offers the first instrumental variables estimates of the wage returns to volunteer experience. The returns are substantial and differ considerably by gender. The results imply that the unequal valuation of volunteer experience by gender is more important in explaining the gender...

This paper estimates the economic and non-economic returns to volunteering for prime-aged women. Estimates of a DCDP model indicate that an extra year of volunteer experience increases wage offers by 8.5% in future part-time work and by 2.6% in future full-time work. On average, working for free...