Joint decisions on household membership and human capital accumulation of youths. The role of expected earnings and local markets

This paper analyses the effects of expected earnings and local markets conditions on the behaviour of young adults with high school diplomas. Decisions to either remain in the parental home or form a new household are modelled jointly with those of either gaining work experience or investing in a university education. Expected lifetime earnings are found to play a crucial role in determining the choice of studying and residing with parents. Poor labour market opportunities discourage young people from working and induce them to study. The cost of housing greatly influences the choice of working and leaving the parental home. Received: 23 March 2001/Accepted: 26 November 2001 All correspondence to Gianna Claudia Giannelli. Helpful comments by two anonymous referees are gratefully acknowledged. Responsible editor: John F. Ermisch.     

Managerial reforms,institutional complexity and individuals: an empirical analysis of higher education

Journal of Management and Governance - Many reforms have aimed at introducing and developing managerial tools in public organisations. However, their limited degree of translation is still...     

Children’s and parents’ time use: empirical evidence on investment in human capital in France,Germany and Italy

We model time allocation choices by youngsters into activities related to the acquisition of human capital: study time, but also socialization, which can enhance personal interaction skills. Using multi-member household time use micro data, we run fractional regression and double hurdle models, providing new empirical evidence for France, Germany and Italy on the link between time allocation by parents and by youngsters, a channel disregarded in the literature on parental investment in children. Our results on the association between parents’ and children’s time use are consistent with different mechanisms: parental role model, intergenerational transmission of preferences, or network effects.     

Is a good example the best sermon? Children’s imitation of parental reading

We use the last two waves of the Italian Time Use Survey to analyse whether children imitate the reading habits of their parents. As reading is crucial for continuous investment in human capital throughout a person’s life, it is important that children acquire the habit of reading. This habit may be developed through both cultural and educational transfers from parents to children, and through imitative behaviours. Imitation is of particular interest, as it suggests that parents can have a direct influence on the formation of their children’s preferences and habits, and that active policies promoting good parenting behaviours might therefore be desirable. We investigate the short-run imitative behaviour of children using a household fixed-effects model in which we identify the impact of the parents’ role model by exploiting the differences in the exposure of siblings to their parents’ example within the same household. We find robust evidence of the existence of an imitation effect: on the day of the survey, children were more likely to had read after seeing either their mother or their father reading.