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A Microeconometric Analysis of Female Labour Force Participation in Italy

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Non-Standard Employment and Quality of Work

Part of the book series: AIEL Series in Labour Economics ((AIEL))

Abstract

In March 2000 the European Council set out an ambitious target for female employment rates in Lisbon, which should reach the level of 60% by 2010. However, Italy is very far from reaching this target. Indeed, according to the Italian National Statistical Institute (Istat) 2003 official data, only 42% of women aged 14–64 were in employment and less than one in two participated in the labour force.

An early version of this chapter was presented at the 2004 Annual Conference of the Associazione Italiana Economisti del Lavoro (Aiel). We wish to thank the Aiel Conference participants and Paolo Sestito for useful comments. Funding from the Italian Ministry of Welfare and Social Policies is gratefully acknowledged. The usual disclaimer applies.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For a detailed survey see Bratti (2003a).

  2. 2.

    In a previous version of this chapter (see the 3rd chapter of our report to the Italian Ministry of Welfare and Social Policies, downloadable at: http://www.dea.unian.it/staffolani/filespdf/rapporto.pdf) we estimated a probit model for the probability of being “head of the household” or “spouse”. Older women and women with low education showed higher probabilities to be in those states.

  3. 3.

    This economic rationalisation of ordinal response models was originally introduced in Cameron and Heckman (1998).

  4. 4.

    The specification can be adjusted so as to allow for both the return and costs of labour force participation to depend on individual and family characteristics (see, for instance, Lauer 2003 in the context of educational choices). However, this has no empirical relevance, since only the effect of the covariates on the ratio of the marginal return to the marginal cost of the LFP states, and not on the single components (return and cost), can be identified.

  5. 5.

    This is acknowledged by the so-called “purist approach” in which child-services variables are jointly modelled with labour force participation. For some examples of such approach in the Italian context see Di Tommaso (1999), Del Boca (2002) and Bratti (2003b).

  6. 6.

    We also estimated the model with interaction terms between elderly care availability and presence of inactive grandparents and between inactive grandparents and young children but they did not turn out to be statistically significant.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche Aziendali e Statistiche, Università degli Studi di Milano, Via Conservatorio 7, 20122, Milan, Italy

    Massimiliano Bratti

  2. Department of Economics, Marche Polytechnic University, piazza Martelli 8, 60100, Ancona, Italy

    Stefano Staffolani

Authors
  1. Massimiliano Bratti
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  2. Stefano Staffolani
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Correspondence to Massimiliano Bratti or Stefano Staffolani .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Economy, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Viale Berengario 51, Modena, 41100, Italy

    Tindara Addabbo

  2. Department of Political Economy, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Viale Berengario 51, Modena, 41100, Italy

    Giovanni Solinas

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Bratti, M., Staffolani, S. (2012). A Microeconometric Analysis of Female Labour Force Participation in Italy. In: Addabbo, T., Solinas, G. (eds) Non-Standard Employment and Quality of Work. AIEL Series in Labour Economics. Physica-Verlag HD. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7908-2106-2_2

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