“Till death do us part”: Easier Access to Divorce and Femicide, with Davide Cipullo and Elisa Muscarella [Link here]
Awards: Etta Chiuri Prize 2026
Abstract: This paper estimates the causal effect of easing access to divorce on domestic violence. We study two legislative reforms in Italy that sharply cut the monetary costs and mandatory waiting periods for divorce, triggering a large and heterogeneous rise in divorce rates nationwide. We combine administrative data on the universe of divorces with a novel dataset on femicides, and we exploit plausibly exogenous variation in municipalities' exposure to the reforms, arising from municipalities' age composition interacted with national age-specific divorce rates. We find that easier access to divorce increases the probability of femicide, an effect primarily driven by domestic cases. We also find a reduction in measures typically associated with non-lethal domestic violence, indicating that lethal and non-lethal violence need not respond in the same way to an improvement in women's outside options.
For Better or Worse: Divorce, Marriage, and Fertility [cooming soon]
Female Groups and Women Empowerment in Nigeria [cooming soon]
Mencarini, L., Nivakoski, S., Agosti, F. & Aassve, A. (2026), Work-family balance during the pandemic: Longitudinal evidence from 27 European countries, Journal of Demographic Research. [Link here]
Agosti, F., Toffolutti, V., Cavalli, N., Nivakoski, S., Mascherini, M., & Aassve, A. (2022). Information and vaccine hesitancy: Evidence from the early stage of the vaccine roll-out in 28 European countries. Plos one, 17(9), e0273555. [Link here]
Agosti, F., Dusatko, J., Meroni, E. C., & Vrobel, J. (2021). Evaluation of the Support to Schools Project in Czech Republic. Publications Office of the European Union: Luxembourg. [Link here]
Eurofound (2021), Impact of COVID-19 on young people in the EU, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg. [Link here]
Emergenza idrica e agricoltura 4.0: soluzioni smart per gestire le risorse idriche, with Chiara Corbo and Filippo Renga [Link here]
ESG360, Sept. 2022