Documents Pronzato, Chiara Daniela 9 results

"Lone mothers are overrepresented among poor people in many European countries. In 1998, in Norway, a welfare reform increased the amount of benefits and introduced working requirements. Using a quasi-experimental model, Mogstad and Pronzato (2012) find a positive effect of the reform on lone mothers' labour supply and a small reduction in poverty. Is the best result that policy makers could obtain in terms of poverty reduction? In this paper, I estimate a discrete choice model of earnings and welfare participation decisions, and use the behavioural estimates to derive the policy parameters which would have minimized poverty among lone mothers."

"In this paper, we aim to explore the impact of social policies and labour market characteristics on the woman's joint decisions of working and having children, using data from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP). We include in the analysis, beyond personal characteristics, variables related to the childcare system, parental leave arrangements, and labour market flexibility. Results show that a non negligible portion of the differences in participation and fertility rates across women from different European countries can be attributed to the characteristics of these institutions."

"According to the agenda for employment set by the European Union in 2000 for the following 10 years, the target for female employment was set at 60 per cent for the year 2010. Although Northern and most Continental countries have achieved this quantitative target, the Mediterranean countries are lagging behind. Labor market policies should be aimed to encourage women's participation and reduce the cost of working. However, the persistence of a negative relationship between participation and fertility in these countries implies that it is important to take fertility into account. We analyse a model of labor supply and fertility, using data from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) for the period 1994–2000, merged with regional data describing the available labor market opportunities in the households' environment."

"In the traditional models of female labour supply formal childcare is assumed to be provided by the market. This is not the case in most European countries. In this paper we estimate the causal effect of a particular kind of informal care, the one provided by grandparents, on mothers' work decisions in Italy. We deal with the endogeneity due to mothers' and grandparents' unobserved preferences by instrumenting grandparents' help. We find that having grandparents helping with childcare increases mothers' labour market participation. The effect is particularly strong for lower educated mothers of young children, in North and Centre Italy."

"There is a heated debate in many European countries about a move towards a welfare system that increases the incentives for lone mothers to move off welfare and into work. We analyze the consequences of a major Norwegian workfare reform of the generous welfare system for lone mothers. Our difference-in-differences estimates show that the policy changes were successful in improving labor market attachment and increasing disposable income of new lone mothers. By contrast, the reform led to a substantial decrease in disposable income and a significant increase in poverty among persistent lone mothers, because a sizeable group was unable to offset the loss of out-of-work welfare benefits with gains in earnings. This suggests that the desired effects of the workfare reform were associated with the side-effects of income loss and increased poverty among a substantial number of lone mothers with insurmountable employment barriers. This finding stands in stark contrast to evidence from similar policy changes in Canada, the UK, and the US, and underscores that policymakers from other developed countries should be cautious when drawing lessons from the successful welfare reforms implemented in Anglo-Saxon countries. "

"From business to politics and academia, the economic effects of the introduction of gender quotas are under scrutiny. We provide new evidence based on the introduction of mandatory gender quotas for boards of directors of Italian companies listed on the stock market. Comparing before and after the reform within firms, we find that quotas are associated with a higher share of female board directors, higher levels of education of board members, and a lower share of older members. We then use the reform period as an instrument for the share of female directors and find no significant impact on firms' performance. Interestingly, the share of female directors is associated with a lower variability of stock market prices. We also run event studies on the stock price reaction to both the announcement and the introduction of gender quotas. A positive effect of the quota law on stock market returns emerges at the date of the board's election. Our results are consistent with gender quotas giving rise to a beneficial restructuring of the board, which is positively received by the market."