In this paper we develop a model to estimate the return to college major and to understand why students appear to give up part of their earnings potential by selecting less profitable majors. Starting from the empirical evidence that individuals who work in a job related to their major field of...

In the examination of the determinants of educational choices, little attention has been devoted to the relationship between family income and the quality of higher education. Using the 1979 and 1997 waves of the NLSY, we show that family income significantly affects the quality of higher...

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...

This paper investigates the impact of the public smoking ban which came into effect in Italy on January 2005 on individual smoking behaviour. Current empirical evidence supports the existence of a negative effect of the Italian ban on smoking prevalence and consumption in the general population....

Using large longitudinal survey data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study, this paper estimates the effec of maternal time inputs on early child development. We find that maternal time is a quantitatively important determinant of skill formation and that its effect declines with child age. There...

This paper investigates the impact of the public smoking ban which came into effect in Italy on January 2005 on individual smoking behaviour. Current empirical evidence supports the existence of a negative effect of the Italian ban on smoking prevalence and consumption in the general population....

This paper investigates the effect of earnings and employment opportunities on pre-marital fertility. Using data from a sample of British women born in 1970, we estimate an independent competing risk harzard model of fertility and cohabitation decisions. Our results show that individual earnings...

This paper investigates the way in which job mobility contributes to the emergence of a gender wage gap in the Italian labour market. We show that men experience higher wage growth than women during the first 10 years of their career, and that this difference is particularly large when workers...

This paper investigates a unique feature of the English educational system to estimate the causal effect of compulsory schooling on labour market outcomes. We examine school leaving rules that allow for discrete variation in exit dates by date of birth within school cohorts. This natural...