The determinants of female labor supply in Italy, 1881-2018

Giulia Mancini

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This paper explores the determinants of female labor supply over the course of Italy’s post-unification history (1881-2018). It uses a newly constructed adjusted series of female labor force participation, disaggregated by region and major sector of activity. The panel dimension of the data is exploited to identify the relative importance of competing factors driving the U-shaped trend of female labor supply over the course of Italy’s modernization. We find that structural change (the reallocation of the workforce away from agriculture) plays a relevant, although not exclusive, role in the decreasing trend of female participation, but that the subsequent increase of female work is mostly due to within-industry changes, and not to the rise of the service sector. The current lag of Southern regions in terms of female labor force participation is the result of failed convergence in recent decades.

Keywords: gender; female work; structural change; labor force participation; Italy; 1861-2018. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J16 J22 N33 N34 O14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/102165/1/MPRA_paper_102165.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:pra:mprapa:102165

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().