Documents Mari, Gabriele 2 results

"Women-friendly policies may have perverse effects on the wages of employed women and mothers in particular. Yet few have addressed the causal impact of such policies and the mechanisms they might trigger at the individual level to produce such wage responses. We assess if and how two decades of reforms of parental leave schemes in Germany have shaped changes in the motherhood wage penalty over time. We compare two sweeps of reforms inspired by opposite principles, one allowing for longer periods out of paid work, the other prompting quicker re-entry in the labour market. We deploy panel data (SOEP 1985-2014) and a within-person difference-in-differences design. Motherhood wage penalties were found to be harsher than previously assessed in the 1990s. As parental leave reform triggered longer time spent on leave coupled with better tenure accumulation, wage losses for mothers remained stable in this first period. Conversely, we can no longer detect motherhood wage penalties for women affected by the later reform. Shorter career breaks and increased work hours may have benefited new mothers in the late 2000s, leading to a substantial improvement in their wage prospects."

"In this article, we provide a longitudinal account of institutionally originated, cohort inequalities in a two-tier labour market, taking Italy as an exemplary case of partial and targeted deregulation. We examine the incidence and career consequences of temporary employment relying on panel data, across reforms implemented in the 1990s and early 2000s. A substitution effect is found for the initial stages of workers' careers: while the youngest cohorts of school-leavers increasingly enter the flexible labour market, access to stable positions is hampered. Previous experiences in the flexible segment of the labour force also increase the risk of entrapment in temporary jobs. This lock-in dynamic is more visible for post-reforms cohorts and might have increased labour market inefficiency. Indeed, the entrapment risk has risen disproportionately for those individuals whose (un)observed characteristics could instead predict a faster exit from the flexible labour market, possibly towards stable positions. Our findings cast doubts on the transitory nature of temporary work in Italy and on the efficiency of partial and targeted reforms."