Country-Specific Preferences and Employment Rates in Europe

Simone Moriconi and Giovanni Peri

No def029, DISCE - Working Papers del Dipartimento di Economia e Finanza from Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Dipartimenti e Istituti di Scienze Economiche (DISCE)

Abstract: European countries exhibit significant differences in employment rates of adult males. Differences in labor-leisure preferences, partly determined by cultural values that vary across countries, can be responsible for part of these differences. However, differences in labor market institutions, productivity, and skills of the labor force are also crucial factors and likely correlated with preferences. In this paper we use variation among first- and second-generation cross-country European migrants to isolate the effect of culturally transmitted labor-leisure preferences on individual employment rates. If migrants maintain some of their country of origin labor-leisure preferences as they move to different labor market conditions, we can separate the impact of preferences from the effect of other factors. We find country-specific labor-leisure preferences explain about 24per cent of the top-bottom variation in employment rates across European countries.

Keywords: Labor-Leisure Preferences; Cultural Transmission; Employment; Europe; Migrants. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J22 J61 Z10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 49
Date: 2015-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-lab and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dipartimenti.unicatt.it/economia-finanza-def029.pdf First version, 2015 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Country-specific preferences and employment rates in Europe (2019)
Working Paper: Country-specific preferences and employment rates in Europe (2019)
Working Paper: Country-Specific Preferences and Employment Rates in Europe (2019)
Working Paper: Country-Specific Preferences and Employment Rates in Europe (2015)
Working Paper: Country-Specific Preferences and Employment Rates in Europe (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ctc:serie1:def029

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in DISCE - Working Papers del Dipartimento di Economia e Finanza from Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Dipartimenti e Istituti di Scienze Economiche (DISCE) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Simone Moriconi ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).