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Publications

Turning back the clock: Beliefs about gender roles during lockdown 

(with Boring A.) LIEPP Working paper, Labour Economics, 84, 102363.

Media Coverage: The Economist

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Exposure to Intimate Partner Violence and Children’s Dynamic Skill Accumulation: Evidence from a UK Longitudinal Study

(with Anderberg D.) TI Discussion Paper CESifo WP Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Volume 36, Issue 4, Winter 2020, Pages 783–815 

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The Degree of Poverty Persistence and the Role of Regional Disparities in Italy in Comparison with France, Spain and the UK (with E. Giarda) Social Indicators Research, 136(1), 163-202.

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Research Papers

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Child Socio-emotional Skills: The role of parental inputs

(with Nicoletti C. and Tominey E.) IZA Working Paper HCEO Working Paper  , R&R Journal of Human Capital

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Informed by the psychological literature and our empirical evidence we provide new insights on the technology of socio-emotional skill formation in middle childhood. We confirm existing evidence that increasing parental inputs that enrich the child home environment and reduce stress has larger returns for children with higher socio-emotional skills in early childhood (complementarity), but only for level of inputs that are large. For low level of inputs, i.e. implying a stressful home environment, an increase has a higher return for children with lower socio-emotional skills in early childhood (substitutability), meaning that well targeted policies can reduce middle childhood socio-emotional gaps.

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Media Coverage: RES Media Briefings, voxeu.org

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Culture as a Barrier: Gender Inequality among Migrants (with Gielen A., Webbink D. )

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This paper studies the importance of culture on the persistence of gender inequality. We exploit the mass migration from Suriname to the Netherlands that took place between the unexpected announcement of the Surinamese independence from the Netherlands (February 1974) and actual independence (November 1975). Two distinct ethnic groups with opposing gender roles and family structures arrived in the Netherlands: Creole female-headed families and Hindustani male-headed families. Using Dutch administrative data we find that exposure to the Dutch socio-economic environment improved schooling outcomes of girls relative to boys in both ethnic groups. However, we find remarkable differences between the two ethnic groups on gender inequality in the labor market. Creole women convert their relative gains in schooling into better labor market outcomes, by closing the within group gender wage gap. The gender wage gap remains unchanged and large within Hindustani migrants. This result suggests that labor market returns to schooling depend on gender roles and family norms, and that improving schooling opportunities for girls might not be sufficient to reduce gender inequality in the labor market.

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​​Prolonged worklife among grandfathers: Spillover effects on grandchildren's educational outcomes 

(with Been J., Gielen A., Knoef M.) Tinbergen Institute Discussion Paper 2022-033V, submitted

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Recent policies aiming to prolong worklives have increased older males’ labor supply. Yet, little is known about their intergenerational effects. Using unique Dutch administrative data covering three consecutive generations, this paper studies the impact of increased grandfathers’ labor supply following a reform in unemployment insurance for persons aged 57.5+ on grandchildren’s educational performance. We find that increased grandfathers’ labor supply increases grandchildren’s test scores in 6th grade. The effect is driven by substitution of grandparents’ informal care by formal childcare.

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Explaining Divorce Gaps in Cognitive and Noncognitive Skills of Children 

DERS Working paper New paper version coming soon

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To what extent does parental selection into divorce explain the gap in skills between children of intact and disrupted families? Using the UK Millennium Cohort Study this paper shows that the disadvantage in skills typically found among children of divorce mainly reflects the selection effect, whereby more disadvantaged parents are more likely to divorce. Decomposing children's cognitive and noncognitive skills up until age 11, evidence indicates that pre-divorce characteristics, namely parents' education, family financial resources and interparental conflicts are the most important factors accounting for the divorce gaps in children's skills, implying a negligible impact of divorce itself. Interparental conflicts are often neglected in the literature but are shown to play a major role particularly for noncognitive skills of children. These results suggest that to reduce the disadvantage in skills among children of divorce, interventions targeting these pre-divorce characteristics would be potentially more effective than policies discouraging divorce.

 

Media Coverage: RES Media Briefings, The Times,  The Telegraph, iNews 

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Research in progress

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Cohabiting, Childbirth and Child Human Capital (with Nicoletti C., Salvanes K.G. , Tominey E.) Draft coming soon

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Intimate Partner Violence and Children's Human Capital  (with Anderberg D., Vickery A. ) Draft coming soon

 

How many girl (boy) classmates outperform me? Ordinal rank, peer gender and gender role attitudes (with Vickery A. ) 

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Supply of Tertiary Education and Workers’ Long-run Outcomes (with Brilli Y., Cottini E., Ghinetti P., Parodi F.)

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Understanding the risk of work related accidents at older ages: Insights from administrative data  (with Ardito C., Cottini E., Serrano-Alarcon M.)

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