Gender

This paper analyses the marriage decisions of natives and migrants focusing on the role of legal status  and cultural distance. We exploit a natural experiment, the successive enlargements of the European Union, that shifted the incentives of some groups of foreigners to marry natives. Using Italian administrative data on the universe of marriages and separations, we show that it profoundly changed the composition of mixed marriages. Access to legal status reduces by half the probability of immigrants intermarrying with natives. Building on this evidence, we develop and structurally estimate a multidimensional equilibrium model of marriage and separation allowing for trade-offs between cultural distance, legal status, and other socio-economic spousal characteristics, where individuals match on observed and unobserved characteristics. We quantify the role of legal status and the strength of cultural affinity and show how it relates to linguistic, religious or genetic distance.

We estimate a dynamic life cycle model of labor supply, fertility, and savings, incorporating occupational choices, with specific wage paths and skill atrophy that vary over the career. This allows us to understand the trade-off between occupational choice and desired fertility, as well as sorting both into the labor market and across occupations. We quantify the life cycle career costs associated with children, how they decompose into loss of skills during interruptions, lost earnings opportunities, and selection into more child-friendly occupations. We analyze the long-run effects of policies that encourage fertility and show that they are considerably smaller than short-run effects.

This paper evaluates the long-term consequences of parental death on children’s cognitive and noncognitive skills, as well as on labor market outcomes. We exploit a large administrative data set covering many Swedish cohorts. We develop new estimation methods to tackle the potential endogeneity of death at an early age, based on the idea that the amount of endogeneity is constant or decreasing during childhood. Our method also allows us to identify a set of death causes that are conditionally exogenous. We find that the loss of either a father or a mother on boys' earnings is no higher than 6-7 percent and slightly lower for girls. Our examination of the impact on cognitive skills (IQ and educational attainment) and on noncognitive skills (emotional stability, social skills) shows rather small effects on each type of skill. We find that both mothers and fathers are important, but mothers are somewhat more important for cognitive skills and fathers for noncognitive ones.