L'EMbeDS Data Science Seminar Series

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• Wednesday February 4 2026 (11AM ET - 5PM Rome time): Tim Lenton, University of Exeter

  • Title: Positive tipping points to avoid climate tipping points

  • Abstract: Tipping points in climate science normally refer to small changes in the Earth system that unleash much broader, typically damaging impacts that accelerate climate change. Well-known examples are rising sea levels due to disintegration of the Greenland and West Antarctica ice sheets, or the release of methane from the thawing permafrost. They help to underline the urgency of climate action. Today most people understand we must reduce emissions – and very quickly.  In this webinar, Tim will summarise recent evidence regarding climate tipping points, which supports declarations that we are in a ‘climate emergency’. Then he will turn to identifying positive social tipping points that will need to be triggered to have any hope of limiting global warming to well below 2C. 

• Wednesday March 4 2026 (11AM ET - 5PM Rome time): Sam Baugh, Penn State University

• Wednesday April 8, 2026 (11AM ET - 5PM Rome time): Samuele Centorrino, International Monetary Fund

• Wednesday May 6, 2026 (11AM ET - 5PM Rome time): Federico Crippa, Northwestern University

• Wednesday June 10, 2026 (11AM ET - 5PM Rome time): Tallys Feldens, Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies

  • Title: More Care, Less Cash? Unpacking the EU’s caregivers labor market losses in late career

  • Abstract: Informal caregivers are an important complement to formal healthcare, especially by helping the patients with their daily activities, which prevents institutionalization. However, by providing informal care, people might be giving up paid working hours, which can also affect their propensity to retire when they are in late career. Thus, it is important to ascertain the amount of change in working hours, personal income and transition to retirement that is linked to informal caretaking. Data from 2006 to 2022 of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) is used to collect the individuals over 50 years who reported to have helped people inside or outside their household with personal care, practical household help or help with paperwork. We explored three datasets: the ones who became a caregiver, the ones who left the caregiver role, and those who left the caregiver role due to the death of the care receiver. We compared these three samples against the ones who were never caregivers and employed an event study estimation. To account for the (possibly) non-random allocation in the choice and ability to become a caregiver, the first step in the analysis entailed a propensity score matching (PSM) selecting only those who retain similar observable characteristics. Becoming a caregiver is associated with lower employment income, raising pensions income and a higher chance of retirement. This trend is not reversed when people leave the caregiver roles: either for the ones who stop caregiving for any reason or for the ones who experienced the death of the cared person, the aggregated dynamic effects point to a reduction in employment income and raise in the pension’s income. We investigated age, gender, place of caregiving, country of residence and inter-household effects. These results indicate that caregiving roles have short to medium-term effects and probably affect the late-career choices of the ones who have someone to take care of. Although the provision of informal care can contribute to social support and even generate savings to the health care system, our estimates show that it has a non-negligible impact on late-career choices. Specific policies should address this important trade-off and estimate incentives to decrease the burden of informal care and its financial implications without compromising productivity and human capital losses.