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When exposed to similar migration flows, countries with different institutional systems may respond with different levels of openness. We study in particular the different responses determined by different electoral systems. We find that Winner Take All countries would tend to be more open than countries with PR when all other policies are kept constant, but, crucially, if we consider the endogenous differences in redistribution levels across systems, then the openness ranking may switch.

OBJECTIVE: In this study we test whether perceived stability of employment and perceived resilience to potential job loss affect fertility intentions, net of individual level risk attitudes and considering variation in the local macroeconomic conditions. BACKGROUND: The role of employment uncertainty as a fertility driver has been explored in a number of studies with a limited set of constructs, and with inconclusive results. A key reason for this heterogeneous pattern is that scholars did not recognize the multidimensionality and the prospective nature of employment uncertainty. We address these oversights by considering two key dimensions of employment uncertainty: perceived stability of employment and perceived resilience to potential job loss. METHOD: Our study is conducted using the newly-released 2017 OECD Italian Trustlab survey and its built-in module on self-assessed employment uncertainty (N=521). We perform multivariate analysis using ordered logistic regression. RESULTS: Perception of employment resilience was a powerful predictor of fertility intentions, whereas perception of employment stability had only a limited impact. The observed relationship between resilience and fertility intentions was robust to the inclusion of person-specific risk attitude and it did not depend on aggregate-level variables, such as unemployment and fixed-term contract rates in the area of residence. CONCLUSION: With this paper, we argue that the notion of resilience is crucial for making sense of economic prospects in connection to fertility planning.

Recent developments in applications of network analysis to history are leading to a new way of thinking about how social and economic actors interacted in the past. Focus on the social tie has resulted in increased interest in relational instruments that have not previously been taken into great consideration. This article analyses some of these instruments, and particularly godparenthood and marriage witnessing, as ways to establish formal and public ties. It shows that formalisation, ritualisation and publicity of ties were used by entrepreneurs to establish trust with their business associates, in situations when information was asymmetric or when institutions were perceived as inefficient in guaranteeing mutual good behaviour. The paper underlines both factors of continuity and factors of change over time, from the Middle Ages to today, paying particular attention to the consequences of Reformation and Counter-Reformation on one hand, and of Industrial Revolution and Modernization on the other. It shows, in the light of the most recent literature, that much of what we think to know about the declining importance, for social and economic activity, of family ties and of weaker ties such as godparenthood, is actually a kind of prejudice originating from a twentieth-century ideology of the market in which ancient practices struggle to find a place but are not abandoned.

This paper aims to answer to what extent fertility has a causal effect on households economic wellbeing-an issue that has received considerable interest in development studies and policy analysis. However, only recently has the literature begun to give importance to adequate modelling for estimation of causal effects. We discuss several strategies for causal inference, stressing that their validity must be judged on the assumptions we can plausibly formulate in a given application, which in turn depends on the richness of available data. This discussion has a general importance, representing a set of guidelines that can be helpful to choose the appropriate strategy of analysis. We contrast methods relying on the Unconfoundedness Assumption, which include regressions and propensity score matching, with Instrumental Variable methods. We discuss why they give different estimates of the causal effect using data from the Vietnam Living Standard Measurement Survey.

In this article we compare two techniques that are widely used in the analysis of life course trajectories, latent class analysis (LCA) and sequence analysis (SA). In particular, we focus on the use of these techniques as devices to obtain classes of individual life course trajectories. We first compare the consistency of the classification obtained via the two techniques using an actual dataset on the life course trajectories of young adults. Then, we adopt a simulation approach to measure the ability of these two methods to correctly classify groups of life course trajectories when specific forms of "random" variability are introduced within pre-specified classes in an artificial dataset. In order to do so, we introduce simulation operators that have a life course and/or observational meaning. Our results contribute on the one hand to outline the usefulness and robustness of findings based on the classification of life course trajectories through LCA and SA, on the other hand to illuminate the potential pitfalls of actual applications of these techniques.

We study a setting where anti-discrimination legislation gives rise to adverse selection in the labor market. Firms rely on nonlinear compensation contracts to screen workers who differ in their family/career orientation. This results in a la- bor market equilibrium where career-oriented workers are offered an inefficiently low duration of parental leave. In addition, family-oriented workers are offered lower wages as compared to their equally skilled career-oriented counterparts. We demonstrate the usefulness of mandatory parental leave rules in mitigating the distortion in the labor market and derive conditions under which a Pareto im- provement is possible. We also characterize the optimal parental leave policy and highlight the possibility for parental leave legislation to eliminate the wage penalty of family-oriented workers by supporting pooling employment contracts.

The generous Nordic model of welfare is commonly viewed as an exceptional success, in terms of both equality and economic growth. However, it recently became evident that subgroups of the population with weak labour market attachment and high welfare dependency, such as lone mothers, were vastly overrepresented among the poor. This prompted a workfare reform of the Norwegian welfare system for lone mothers: activity requirements were brought in, time limits imposed and benefit levels raised. To evaluate the reform we introduce an estimator that, unlike the much used difference-in-difference approach, accounts for the fact that policy changes are typically phased in gradually rather than coming into full effect immediately. The results were striking: the workfare reform has not only led to increased earnings and educational attainment but also reduced poverty.

The aim of this paper is to assess the quality of the ranking of institutions obtained with multilevel techniques in presence of different model misspecifications and data structures. Through a Monte Carlo simulation study, we find that it is quite hard to obtain a reliable ranking of the whole effectiveness distribution while, under various experimental conditions, it is possible to identify institutions with extreme performances. Ranking quality increases with increasing intra class correlation coefficient and/or overall sample size. Furthermore, multilevel models where the between and within cluster components of first-level covariates are distinguished perform significantly better than both multilevel models where the two effects are set to be equal and the fixed effect models.

ABSTRACT It is well established that the departure from the parental home of young Italian adults occurs at a particularly late age, especially when compared to northern European countries. Moreover, in Italy a large gap exists between young people’s aspirations and their subsequent realization. This study aims to explore the factors favouring or hampering the successful achievement of residential independence from the family of origin. Using data from the longitudinal surveys “Family and Social Subjects”, carried out by the Italian National Institute of Statistics (Istat) in 2003 and 2007, we analyze leaving home as a mid-term decision-making process. Our results provide empirical evidence that the inability to find a stable job reduces young adults’ autonomy. Net of employment status, attitudes and social norms also have an important effect on the intention to leave the family home. The socio-cultural status of the family of origin specifically favours the successful realization of the behaviour. Notably, this effect is gender-specific, with women more influenced by the mother and men by the father.

We empirically assess the effect of historical slavery on the African American family structure. Our hypothesis is that female single headship among blacks is more likely to emerge in association not with slavery per se, but with slavery in sugar plantations, since the extreme demographic and social conditions prevailing in the latter have persistently affected family formation patterns. By exploiting the exogenous variation in sugar suitability, we establish the following. In 1850, sugar suitability is indeed associated with extreme demographic outcomes within the slave population. Over the period 1880-1940, higher sugar suitability determines a higher likelihood of single female headship. The effect is driven by blacks and starts fading in 1920 in connection with the Great Migration. OLS estimates are complemented with a matching estimator and a fuzzy RDD. Over a linked sample between 1880 and 1930, we identify an even stronger intergenerational legacy of sugar planting for migrants. By 1990, the effect of sugar is replaced by that of slavery and the black share, consistent with the spread of its influence through migration and intermarriage, and black incarceration emerges as a powerful mediator. By matching slaves’ ethnic origins with ethnographic data we rule out any influence of African cultural traditions.