On September 12-13, 2019 the 34th Annual Conference of the Italian Association of Labour Economists (AIEL) took place in Novara/Italy. During the conference, a joint session AIEL-CCME/GLO was organized. Please find here the program with the speakers in bold, the bio of the speakers and the paper abstracts. The report was provided by Francesco Pastore (University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli), GLO Country Lead Italy and GLO Thematic Cluster Lead School-to-Work Transition.

2.6 Joint Session AIEL-CCME / GLO

Organizer and chair: GLO Fellow Enkelejda Havari (European Commission JRC)

Antonella Rocca (University of Naples Parthenope), Floro Ernesto Caroleo (University of Naples Parthenope and GLO), Francesco Pastore (University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli and GLO), Claudio Quintano (University of Naples Parthenope):
The School-to-Work Transition: What Affects Mainly its Duration?

Elena Claudia Meroni (European Commission JRC), Daniela Piazzalunga (Università di Verona), Chiara Pronzato (Università di Torino):
Use of Extra-school Time and Child Behaviour

Enkelejda Havari (European Commission JRC and GLO), Franco Peracchi (Georgetown University, EIEF and University of Rome “Tor Vergata”):
Intergenerational Effects of War on Education: Evidence from World War II in Europe

Silvia Granato (University of Warwick):
Early Influences and the Gender Gap in STEM

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Bios

Antonella Rocca is Aggregate Professor in Economic Statistics (Qualified as Associate Professor) at the Department of Management and Quantitative Studies, (Excellence Department), University of Naples “Parthenope”, Italy, where she teaches “Statistics for Business” and “Information systems for decision-making processes in public administration”. Her research interests concern labor markets, with a focus on the most disadvantaged groups (young people, women, immigrants). She uses econometric models and decomposition techniques for the analysis of economic gaps and constructs composite indicators for cross-countries comparisons. She collaborates with the European Commission and other international scientific organizations as expert for the evaluation of scientific projects.

Elena Claudia Meroni is Research Fellow at the European Commission, Joint Research Centre (Ispra, Italy). She is part of the Competence Centre on Microeconomic Evaluation (CC-ME), within the Monitoring, Indicators and Evaluation unit. She holds a PhD in Statistics from the University of Padua. During her PhD she has been a visiting scholar at Pompeu Fabra University. Her main research interests are policy evaluation, economics of education, labour economics, economics of the family and demography.

Enkelejda Havari is Research Fellow at the European Commission, Joint Research Centre (Ispra, Italy). She is part of the Competence Centre on Microeconomic Evaluation (CC-ME), within the Monitoring, Indicators and Evaluation unit. Before joining the Commission in 2015, she was a Visiting Scholar and Lecturer at the Economics Department of Boston University and a Post-Doctoral researcher at the University of Ca’ Foscari Venice. She holds a Ph.D. in Econometrics and Empirical Economics from the University of Rome “Tor Vergata” and a M.Sc. in Economics from the University of Bologna. Her research interests lie in the area of applied micro-econometrics and impact evaluation with a special focus on labour economics, economics of education, and family economics. 

Silvia Granato is Research Fellow at the European Commission, Joint Research Centre (Ispra, Italy). She is part of the Competence Centre on Microeconomic Evaluation (CC-ME), within the Monitoring, Indicators and Evaluation unit. Before joining the Commission in September 2019 she was a Teaching Fellow at the Economics Department of Warwick University, teaching courses on labour economics and applied economics. In 2018 she completed her PhD in Economics at Queen Mary University of London, after obtaining two Master’s Degrees in Economics – at the University of Naples and at the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics.  Her main research interests are in the area of applied micro-econometrics, in particular topics related to economics of education and gender economics. 

Abstracts of papers

The school to work transition: What affects mainly its duration?
Antonella Rocca (University of Naples Parthenope) with Floro Ernesto Caroleo (University of Naples Parthenope), Francesco Pastore (University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli), Claudio Quintano (University of Naples Parthenope)

In this research, the authors analyze the School-To-Work Transition (STWT) in a selection of 21 European countries by level of education (low and medium vs high education). The main scope of this research consists in identifying the determinants of such different durations of the STWT across the countries considered. Duration models based on survivor functions are used including a wide spectrum of factors linked to personal characteristics, labour market and institutional factors and aspects related to the education system and the type of transition regime. The authors contribute to the existing literature in many ways. First of all, they analyze the duration of STWT rather than unemployment duration. Second, a separate analysis of low and medium educated is provided, which is usually neglected in previous studies. Data refer to the EU-SILC cross-sectional waves from 2013 to 2017. All sample units aged between 18 and 34, who completed education two years before, are included in the analysis. Those who are attempting military service, student-workers and permanent disabled are also excluded from the analysis. Results suggest that, even after controlling for all these factors, Continental and Liberal countries show performances significantly higher in comparison above all with the countries of the Mediterranean regime. Another important result is that, after the model has been corrected to account for unobserved heterogeneity, data show positive duration dependence, that means that the probability of achieving a job increases with time but also the need to improve the set of indicators for the education system monitoring and the importance of individual characteristics not captured by the observed covariates.

Use of extra-school time and child behaviour
Elena Claudia Meroni (European Commission JRC) with Daniela Piazzalunga (University of Verona) and Chiara Pronzato (University of Turin)

In this paper, we study the effects of extra-school activities on children’s non-cognitive development, using data from the Millennium Cohort Study (UK) and focusing on children aged 7-11 years old. We classify the time spent out of school into six homogenous groups of activities, using principal component analysis, and estimate the relationship thereof with five behavioural dimensions drawn from the Strength and Difficulties questionnaire, exploiting the panel structure of the data. Results show the beneficial effects on children’s behaviour of sports, school-related activities, time with parents and household chores, while a small detrimental effect of video-screen time is detected. We test the robustness of our estimates against omitted variable bias, and the results are confirmed.

Intergenerational effects of war on education: Evidence from World War II in Europe Enkelejda Havari (European Commission JRC) with Franco Peracchi (Georgetown University, EIEF and University of Rome “Tor Vergata”)

The negative effects of war on the education and health of the civilian population are well documented. However, there is no evidence on whether these effects extend to subsequent generations. To fill-in this gap we analyze the inter-generational effects of World War II on educational attainments focusing on parent-child dyads in which parents were born in 1926– 1949. We show two things. First, parents who suffered the war, that is, were exposed to major war events or personally experienced war-related hardship, ended up with less schooling than parents with similar characteristics who did not. Second, the children of parents who suffered the war have lower educational attainments than the children of parents with similar characteristics who did not suffer the war. Our reduced form results also suggest estimates of the coefficient of inter-generational transmission of education based on war-related hardships as instruments. These estimates show that mother’s education matters more for daughters, whereas father’s education matters more for sons.

Early influences and the gender gap in STEM
Silvia Granato (University of Warwick)

Despite the striking reversal of the gender gap in industrialized countries in the last 40 years, women still pursue degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) much less than their male peers do. I use data from a uniquely rich and largely unexplored source that combines both administrative and survey information on the population of Italian graduates to analyse the determinants of gender gaps in STEM graduation rates for Italian college leaving cohorts from 2010 to 2015, with emphasis on family, cultural and school influences, as well as geographic proximity in the supply of STEM degrees. Half of the gender gap in STEM graduation is attributed to the gender difference in maths and science content of the respective high school curricula. My results indicate that in Italy the gender gap in STEM graduation has its roots in a gendered choice originating many years before. This finding suggests that the role of the influence of environmental factors – such as the family – in the different educational choices of females and males is even greater than can be estimated through this study.

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