Abstract
The paper analyzes the impact of life course events, and in particular of parenthood, on the paid and unpaid working activity of dual-earner couples in Italy. To this purpose, we use the panel dataset provided by the 2003--2007 Istat Multipurpose Survey. To correct misspecification due to unobserved variables, we adopt a difference-in-differences specification of simultaneous equations of market and domestic work supply. Our results show that the negative effect of transition to parenthood on female paid work supply is stronger than the positive effect of wages.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Consequently, no instrumental variables are necessary to estimate the model.
- 3.
We take into account only partners living together in both periods (2003 and 2007).
- 4.
Matching algorithm is implemented in STATA 11. More details regarding matching procedure, not presented here for the sake of brevity, are available on request.
- 5.
In our model, we consider several changes of status referred to specific life course transitions, as in Baxter et al., 2008 (see also [15], pp. 146–151). Conley and Taber [5] found that standard methods generally used to perform inference in DID models with more transitions, or with the same transition observed in different groups, are not completely appropriate, and lead to underestimation of the standard errors size. Nevertheless, we decided to estimate more transition effects in our analysis in order to obtain a richer model specification.
- 6.
To simplify the model, variables referred to the partner are not included as regressors.
- 7.
One exception is the logarithm of hourly wage, whose coefficient measures the wage elasticity of labour supply.
- 8.
Note however that the logarithmic transformation of some variables (monotonic transformation, in any case) may introduce small distortions.
- 9.
An iterative GLS procedure has been implemented by writing a “do” file in STATA. In particular, we employ, at each iteration, the residual-based estimate of error terms covariances to correct linear regressions.
- 10.
Note that in several studies SURE models with censored dependent variables are estimated using the Lee method as, for instance, the demand systems models [8, i.a.].
- 11.
The couples who had two (or more) children between 2003 and 2007 (12 couples in total) are included only in the sample containing all orders of births.
- 12.
For sake of brevity, here we do not present extensively the estimates of the stratified analysis by order of birth, referring, respectively, to the first-order birth and to the second-order birth transition.
- 13.
To compensate for the reduction of paid work caused by the transition to motherhood (−0.40 + 0.14 = −26 %) and given the wage elasticity coefficient equal to 1.36 (Table 1), women’s hourly wage should increase by a percentage of 19 % (obtained by the ratio 0.26/1.36).
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank participants at the 46th Scientific Meeting of the Italian Statistical Society—Session “Demographic methods and models”—for their useful comments.
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Campolo, M.G., Di Pino, A., Rizzi, E.L. (2016). How Do Life Course Events Affect Paid and Unpaid Work of Italian Couples?. In: Alleva, G., Giommi, A. (eds) Topics in Theoretical and Applied Statistics. Studies in Theoretical and Applied Statistics(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27274-0_17
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