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 the role of different policy instruments in the design of parental leave policies. Using Italian administrative data on the universe of working mothers, I implement a difference-in-differences design around two unemployment insurance reforms that increased, respectively, the level of benefits and the duration of benefits without offering job protection. I provide novel insights on the trade-offs that mothers face in making leave decisions, the relative value of benefits and job protection, and the incentive costs associated with parental leave policies. Both reforms increased separations from the pre-birth employer and delayed mothers’ return to work. I estimate the costs of changing the generosity of unprotected benefits in terms of earnings, labor force participation, and benefits from other social programs. Taking up unprotected benefits has an enormous cost in terms of foregone earnings for mothers, suggesting that the insurance value of short-term benefits is much higher than the value of job protection. I explore the role of informational frictions and childcare availability in shaping mothers’ leave decisions. I develop a conceptual framework to evaluate the welfare effects of parental leave policies. The analysis demonstrates job protection’s key role in reducing the incentive costs of parental leave policies while showing that mothers highly value insurance in the short term. Increasing the duration of benefits while at the same time extending job protection is welfare improving for mothers.

In this paper, I investigate the role of firms in the final incidence of Earned Income Tax Credits. Using administrative data and taking advantage of the introduction of a large, employer-administered EITC program in Italy, I study firm-level responses to the tax credit by exposure to the program. I find that the earnings of eligible workers in more exposed firms decrease compared to comparable less exposed firms, with highly exposed firms capturing around 30% more of the transfer through reduced wage rates. I find significant spillover effects of the reform, with the earnings of similar non-eligible workers in more exposed firms decreasing compared to less exposed firms. The results are consistent with a monopsonistic labor market and with rent-seeking behavior by firms. The analysis highlights the main trade-offs between employer and government-administered EITC for the design of these programs.

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.

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.