Papers by Daniela Del Boca
European Economic Review, Jul 1, 2021
Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research pu... more Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but IZA takes no institutional policy positions. The IZA research network is committed to the IZA Guiding Principles of Research Integrity. The IZA Institute of Labor Economics is an independent economic research institute that conducts research in labor economics and offers evidence-based policy advice on labor market issues. Supported by the Deutsche Post Foundation, IZA runs the world's largest network of economists, whose research aims to provide answers to the global labor market challenges of our time. Our key objective is to build bridges between academic research, policymakers and society. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author.
Social Science Research Network, 2020
This paper investigates the impact of parenting courses on fragile families' time use with their ... more This paper investigates the impact of parenting courses on fragile families' time use with their children. Courses aimed at raising parental awareness of the importance of educational activities are offered in four Italian cities (Naples, Reggio Emilia, Teramo and Palermo) within the framework of the social program "FA.C.E. Farsi Comunità Educanti" and with the cooperation of the program "Con i Bambini" 2. To conduct the impact evaluation 3 , we designed a randomized controlled trial involving random assignment of the families (mostly mothers). At the end of the intervention, we administered an assessment questionnaire both to the treatment group, which took the course, and to the control group, which did not. Comparing the outcomes, we find attending the course increased families' awareness of the importance of educational activities for children, the frequency with which they read to the child, and their desire to spend more time with the child.
Social Science Research Network, 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a dramatic impact on families' lives, with parents all over the wor... more The COVID-19 pandemic has had a dramatic impact on families' lives, with parents all over the world struggling to meet the increased demands of housework, childcare and homeschooling. Much of the additional burden has been shouldered by women, particularly in countries with a traditionally uneven division of household labor. Yet the dramatic increase in remote work from home since the pandemic also has the potential to increase paternal involvement in family life and thus to redress persistent domestic gender role inequalities. This effect depends on the working arrangements of each partner, whether working remotely, working at their usual workplace or ceasing work altogether. We examine the role of working arrangements during the pandemic on the traditional division of household labor in Italy using survey data from interviews with a representative sample of working women conducted during the two waves of COVID-19 (April and November 2020). Our data show that the gender gap in household care related activities was widest during the first wave of the pandemic, and although it was less pronounced during the second wave, it was still higher than pre-COVID-19. The time spent by women on housework, childcare, and assisting their children with distance learning did not depend on their partners' working arrangements. Conversely, men spent fewer hours helping with the housework and distance learning when their partners were at home. It is interesting, however, that although men who worked remotely or not at all did devote more time to domestic chores and child care, the increased time they spent at home did not seem to lead to a reallocation of couples' roles in housework and child care. Finally, we find that working arrangements are linked to women's feelings of uncertainty, with heterogeneous effects by level of education.
IZA Journal of Labor Economics
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a dramatic impact on families’ lives because of the increased deman... more The COVID-19 pandemic has had a dramatic impact on families’ lives because of the increased demands of housework and childcare. Much of the additional burden has been shouldered by women. Yet, the rise in remote working also has the potential to increase paternal involvement in family life and thus to reduce gender role inequalities. This effect depends on the working arrangements of each partner, whether working remotely, at their usual workplace, or ceasing work altogether. Using two waves of an ad-hoc survey conducted in April and November 2020, we show that the time spent by women in domestic activities did not depend on their partners’ working arrangements. Conversely, men spent fewer hours helping with housework and home schooling when their partners were at home. Although men who worked remotely or did not work at all devoted more time to household activities during the second wave of COVID-19, the increased time they spent at home did not seem to lead to a reallocation of co...
SSRN Electronic Journal
The importance of investment in early childhood education (ECE) has been widely documented in the... more The importance of investment in early childhood education (ECE) has been widely documented in the literature. Among the benefits, particularly for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, is its potential to mitigate educational inequality. However, some evidence also suggests that the positive effects of ECE on later outcomes tend to dissipate over time, leaving children who attended such programmes no better off academically than those who did not. This paper studies the relationship between students' years spent in ECE and the results of their educational assessment outcomes at age 15. Using PISA survey data for fourteen European countries from 2015 and 2018, we conduct a crosscountry comparison of student performance in reading, mathematics, and science, correlating the results to early childcare and pre-primary school attendance. Our findings show that participation in early childcare is associated with better assessments at age 15, but that the benefit is nonlinear and peaks at 3-4 years of childcare attendance. Examination of gender heterogeneity patterns reveals differences in girls' and boys' performance on the assessments; however, there are no gender differences in the relationship between childcare participation and test outcomes. We also explore differences related to the type of educational system attended and find distinct results for the unitary and separate settings.
SSRN Electronic Journal
This paper investigates the impact of parenting courses on families' time use with their children... more This paper investigates the impact of parenting courses on families' time use with their children in urban areas in Italy. Courses aimed at raising parental awareness of the importance of educational activities were offered in four cities (Naples, Reggio Emilia, Teramo and Palermo) within the framework of the social program "FA.C.E. Farsi Comunità Educanti". In order to conduct the impact evaluation, we designed a randomized controlled trial involving random assignment of the families (mostly mothers). At the end of the intervention, we administered an assessment questionnaire both to the treatment group, which took the course, and to the control group, which did not. Comparing the outcomes, we find that attending the course increased families' awareness of the importance of educational activities for children, reading often to the children and spending more time with them.
European Economic Review, 2021
Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research pu... more Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but IZA takes no institutional policy positions. The IZA research network is committed to the IZA Guiding Principles of Research Integrity. The IZA Institute of Labor Economics is an independent economic research institute that conducts research in labor economics and offers evidence-based policy advice on labor market issues. Supported by the Deutsche Post Foundation, IZA runs the world's largest network of economists, whose research aims to provide answers to the global labor market challenges of our time. Our key objective is to build bridges between academic research, policymakers and society. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2020
Evidence from past economic crises indicates that recessions often affect men's and women's emplo... more Evidence from past economic crises indicates that recessions often affect men's and women's employment differently, with a greater impact on male-dominated sectors. The current COVID-19 crisis presents novel characteristics that have affected economic, health and social phenomena over wide swaths of the economy. Social distancing measures to combat the spread of the virus, such as working from home and school closures, have placed an additional tremendous burden on families. Using new survey data collected in April 2020 from a representative sample of Italian women, we analyse jointly the effect of COVID-19 on the working arrangements, housework and childcare of couples where both partners work. Our results show that most of the additional workload associated to COVID-19 falls on women while childcare activities are more equally shared within the couple than housework activities. According to our empirical estimates, changes to the amount of housework done by women during the emergency do not seem to depend on their partners' working arrangements. With the exception of those continuing to work at their usual place of work, all of the women surveyed spend more time on housework than before. In contrast, the amount of time men devote to housework does depend on their partners' working arrangements: men whose partners continue to work at their usual workplace spend more time on housework than before. The link between time devoted to childcare and working arrangements is more symmetric, with both women and men spending less time with their children if they continue to work away from home. For home schooling, too, parents who continue to go to their usual workplace after the lockdown are less likely to spend greater amounts of time with their children than before. Similar results emerge for our sample of women not working before the emergency. Finally, analysis of work-life balance satisfaction shows that working women with children aged 0-5 are those who say they find balancing work and family more difficult during COVID-19. The work-life balance is especially difficult to achieve for those with partners who continue to work outside the home during the emergency.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2020
We explore the role of financial and pension information in increasing women's knowledge and awar... more We explore the role of financial and pension information in increasing women's knowledge and awareness of their future pension status, and consequently, in reducing the gender pension gap. A representative sample of 1249 Italian working women were interviewed to assess their knowledge about pensions and financial issues and about their own savings and personal wealth planned for retirement. The responses showed that their knowledge and awareness of retirement planning was limited. We then ran a randomized experiment to evaluate the effect of increased information regarding pensions on women's awareness, knowledge, and behaviors. Women in the treated group were provided information in the form of three short online tutorials. A follow-up survey shows that these women became more interested and aware of pension schemes and retirement options after completing the tutorials and were more likely to be better informed and keen to obtain further information. When looking at changes in behavior, we find that treated women who are closer to retirement are more likely to believe that they would make different work-life decisions if they received specific pension information in a timely fashion. They are also more likely to have a supplementary pension fund if they are concerned about their standard of living after retirement.
Journal of Labor Economics, 2017
While a large literature has focused on the impact of parental investments on child cognitive dev... more While a large literature has focused on the impact of parental investments on child cognitive development, very little is known about the role of child's own investments alongside that of the parents. By using the Child Development Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we model the cognitive production function for adolescents using an augmented value-added model and adopt an estimation method that takes account of unobserved child characteristics. We …nd that a child's own investments made during adolescence matter more than the mother's. Our empirical results appear to be robust to several sensitivity checks.
Labor Migration, EU Enlargement, and the Great Recession, 2016
Migration in Italy is Backing the Old Age Welfare 1 Our research analyzes the effect of changes i... more Migration in Italy is Backing the Old Age Welfare 1 Our research analyzes the effect of changes in migration policies and the accession to the European Union of former countries of emigration, considering the crucial role played by migrants in an aging society. We focus on the demand of family-care workers by using the last five years of the Italian Labour Force Survey dataset. Our results show that especially during the last years of recession, foreign labor (mostly female) has become fundamental in the family sector, favoring the participation of Italian skilled women in the labor market.
Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research pu... more Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but IZA takes no institutional policy positions. The IZA research network is committed to the IZA Guiding Principles of Research Integrity. The IZA Institute of Labor Economics is an independent economic research institute that conducts research in labor economics and offers evidence-based policy advice on labor market issues. Supported by the Deutsche Post Foundation, IZA runs the world's largest network of economists, whose research aims to provide answers to the global labor market challenges of our time. Our key objective is to build bridges between academic research, policymakers and society. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author.
In this study, we analyze the impact of attendance of formal early childcare on a number of non- ... more In this study, we analyze the impact of attendance of formal early childcare on a number of non- cognitive child outcomes, conditional on several socio-demographic characteristics of the household and the child. While several studies have explored the determinants of cognitive outcomes, in our analysis we focus on non-cognitive skills that were found to be important determinants of cognitive skills and of later life outcomes. Using a newly available data-set for Northern Italy on child care and child outcomes1, we consider the impact of attendance of formal childcare on non-cognitive outcomes, such as attitudes to schooling and social behavior, identified among children born in 2006 at the end of the first year of primary school. Using innovative empirical strategies to deal with endogeneity and imperfect measurement of non-cognitive outcomes, we show that attending an infant toddler center significantly improves school readiness and social interactions a few years later. Coherently...
Transfers to Households with Children and Child Development * In this paper we utilize a model of... more Transfers to Households with Children and Child Development * In this paper we utilize a model of household investments in the development of children to explore the impact of various transfer policies on the distribution of child outcomes. We develop a cost criterion that can be used to compare the cost effectiveness of unrestricted, restricted, and conditional cash transfer systems, and find that an optimally chosen conditional cash transfer program is the most cost efficient way to attain any given gain in average child quality. We explore several design elements for the conditional cash transfer system and discuss the role of production function uncertainty and measurement error.
Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research pu... more Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but IZA takes no institutional policy positions. The IZA research network is committed to the IZA Guiding Principles of Research Integrity. The IZA Institute of Labor Economics is an independent economic research institute that conducts research in labor economics and offers evidence-based policy advice on labor market issues. Supported by the Deutsche Post Foundation, IZA runs the world's largest network of economists, whose research aims to provide answers to the global labor market challenges of our time. Our key objective is to build bridges between academic research, policymakers and society. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2020
Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research pu... more Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but IZA takes no institutional policy positions. The IZA research network is committed to the IZA Guiding Principles of Research Integrity. The IZA Institute of Labor Economics is an independent economic research institute that conducts research in labor economics and offers evidence-based policy advice on labor market issues. Supported by the Deutsche Post Foundation, IZA runs the world's largest network of economists, whose research aims to provide answers to the global labor market challenges of our time. Our key objective is to build bridges between academic research, policymakers and society. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author.
OECD Labour Market and Social Policy Occasional Papers, 2002
Document complet disponible sur OLIS dans son format d'origine Complete document available on OLI... more Document complet disponible sur OLIS dans son format d'origine Complete document available on OLIS in its original format DEELSA/ELSA/WD(2002)5 Unclassified English text only Cancels & replaces the same document of
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Papers by Daniela Del Boca