Research

This Chapter investigates the relationship between technological changes, labour market frictions, and firms’ labour market power. We provide guidance through the main trends that characterised labour markets during the last decades as well as through the literature on technology adoption, firms’ concentration in the product market, and firms’ labour market power. We discuss how new technologies can change the matching process in the labour market. We complement this with a descriptive analysis of firms’ labour market power in two large OECD economies, the United States and Italy, that investigates heterogeneities across sectors that are exposed to different levels of innovation. We also present a descriptive analysis of how the recent economic shock induced by the COVID-19 pandemic can affect the firms’ labour market power. We discuss the policy implications as well as potential developments for future research.

The postponement of parenthood coupled with longer life expectancies is changing the life- course context within which individuals decide whether to become parents. Previous research has highlighted the positive impact of grandparents on their adult children's fertility plans through childcare, but the association between grandparental health and fertility expectations remains unclear. Thus, this paper offers a novel perspective on the issue of family support by investigating how caregiving responsibilities towards elderly parents affect adult children’s decision to have a child. Using a long panel of Australian survey data, we examine whether adult children changed their fertility expectations after becoming care providers to their parents. To address issues of unobserved heterogeneity and selection into parenthood and caregiving, we employ a generalized difference-in-differences model. We find that becoming a parental caregiver leads to a 6% reduction in fertility expectations within the first two years, and this effect intensifies over time. The results are consistent across genders and more pronounced for respondents with only one child. These findings highlight the importance of analysing fertility expectations within the context of the family network and suggest that interventions aimed at reducing the caregiver burden could provide an opportunity to positively influence fertility levels.

This paper studies how mothers value benefit generosity relative to job protection after child-birth. In Italy, mothers may choose between job-protected parental leave with low benefits and un-employment insurance with higher benefits but no job protection. Using reforms to benefit levels and duration, I show that greater generosity induces mothers to trade job protection for unemployment insurance, with persistent employment and earnings losses. These choices reveal substantial value for post-birth transfers. Interpreting them poses a methodological challenge: in parental leave, time at home with an infant is partly an intended welfare benefit rather than only a behavioral cost. The re-vealed valuation reflects resources during leave, caregiving time, and relief from childcare constraints, weighed against the perceived cost of giving up job protection. Heterogeneity across reforms, household income, and regional characteristics provides evidence on these components and on behavioral frictions that may arise when households make program choices shortly after childbirth. In an MVPF framework, both reforms are approximately welfare-neutral under aggregate valuations; conservative benchmarks and statistical-discrimination costs lower the welfare value of the duration reform. The results show that post-birth transfers have meaningful value, but that their welfare gains depend on whether benefit generosity is paired with job protection and with measures addressing the liquidity, childcare, and behavioral frictions shaping mothers’ choices.

Does refugee immigration affect the quality of neighborhood amenities? In this paper, we exploit the unique setting provided by the Italian refugee reception system to study the effect of refugees’ inflows on housing prices, the extent to which this response reflects individuals’ preferences for immigration, and perceived neighborhood quality. Using administrative data on the exact location of reception centers and a dynamic event study design, we find that, after the opening of a reception center, areas close to the center experience a relative fall in housing prices of about 1%, mainly driven by an amenity effect. We find that the negative effect is larger in larger cities and decreases with the size of the center and the availability of services to facilitate integration. We test whether opening refugees centers impacts local public spending, which we use to proxy the actual quality of local amenities. We find that after the opening of a reception center, areas close to the center experience a relative fall in expenditure per capita of about 2.4%, largely driven by a reduction in welfare spending. Given this well-established negative effect, are there factors or policy responses that might mitigate it? Our findings suggest that investing in services devoted to the mutual integration of the local and refugee community can be effective.

Women enter the labor market with persistent disadvantages despite often outperforming men academically. Why do these gaps emerge so early? We study a randomized mentoring program that pairs female STEM students with experienced professional women to identify the frictions underlying gender differences at labor-market entry. Twenty months after the intervention, mentored students are more likely to reject poorly matched job offers and to invest in professional job-search activities. We show that these effects are driven primarily by improvements in labor-market preparation, including interview readiness, knowledge of employers, and awareness of career opportunities, rather than by changes in confidence, self-esteem, or expectations. Comparing the experimental estimates to baseline gender gaps, we find that mentoring closes nearly the entire female disadvantage in several dimensions of labor-market preparation. Rich implementation data further reveal that female mentors systematically adapt their advice to the constraints they perceive young women to face, complementing practical career guidance with gender-specific support. Together, the findings suggest that informational and preparatory frictions during the school-to-work transition constitute an important and previously underappreciated source of early gender inequality.

We study patterns in maternal breastfeeding in the United States from 1950 to 2015. Our primary innovation is the aggregation of six datasets to provide long-term, nationally representative trends in breastfeeding initiation and persistence over 60 years. These new data show that breastfeeding rates declined from 1950 to the mid-1970s and then increased sharply. Today breastfeeding initiation rates in the U.S. are at a 50-year high. Breastfeeding through 6 months parallels trends in initiation until around the beginning of the 2000s, when initiation rates continued to rise while continuation has plateaued at around 35%. We also explore changes in selection into breastfeeding by socio-economic class and race. Higher socioeconomic status groups increased breastfeeding more quickly in the 1970s, with other groups catching up in the 1980s to the present. However, these groups have not shown the same catch-up in breastfeeding continuation and, as a result, selection in breastfeeding persists.