We examine the impact of parenthood on labor market outcomes for men and women in Italy. We perform two analyses. First, we use a fixed effects framework to examine the impact of marriage and childbearing on labor market outcomes separately for men and women. Then, we follow the child penalty approach developed in Kleven et al. (2019) to examine the total impact of childbearing on gender inequality. We find that childbirth leads to lower employment and earnings for women with little change for men. These impacts increase with the number of children. Overall, having a child leads to a 39.1% decrease in female employment, a 12.2% increase in part-time work and a 33% decline in income over the following 10 years relative to (non-significant) changes for men.

This paper studies the financial and political consequences of municipal defaults as signals of governance failure. In Italy, municipalities with unsustainable debt may declare default, triggering austerity measures intended to restore fiscal stability. Exploiting the staggered timing of these events, I estimate a difference-in-differences model to identify their impact on public finances and voting behaviour. Defaults reduce municipal debt by more than 50% over the following five years, primarily through spending cuts, increased tax revenues, and gains in fiscal efficiency. At the same time, defaults lower the quality of elected politicians in the following election, driven by a deterioration in the pool of candidates. 

This paper examines how Islamist terrorist attacks affect labour market discrimination against migrants. We combine a field experiment on hiring behaviour with the exogenous timing of terrorist events in a difference-in-differences design. Attacks reduce interview callbacks by 8.5 percentage points in affected countries and generate spillovers to other countries, with effects that persist for up to one month. These effects are not driven by migrants’ affiliation with Islam. To test the role of information in attenuating employer bias, we find that providing information about high ability reduces its impact, but only when natives do not signal their type.