Essays in family and labour economics

In the first chapter I estimate the effect of providing unpaid care to adults on caregivers' employment; with data from the European Community Household Panel. Using the presence of disabled individuals inside the household as an' instrument for caregiving, I found that the negative effect on employment is magnified with respect to OL8. However, when individual time constant heterogeneity is accounted for using within group regressions, the estimated negative effect is smaller and the use of instruments does not make a difference. In the second I discuss a theoretical model for the distance at which adult children decide to live with respect to their parents. The main result from previous research (Konrad et al, 2002) was that siblings tend to live at different locations, with the first born moving far away in order to leave to the youngest the burden of elderly care. I added a stage in which adult children may need help from their parents with their own young offspring. I found that symmetric equilibria may arise, where siblings locate at the same distance in order to share elderly care and benefit jointly from (grand)child care. In the third I estimate the causal effect of retirement on house work, using the 2007 Italian Survey of Income and Living Conditions. At any age, ret irees and workers may have different preferences on leisure and home production. Therefore a simple comparison of them would not give us the quantity of interest. Differently, I exploited the fact that a large fraction of individuals go into retirement as soon as eligible for a pension. In a Fuzzy Regression Discontinuity Design, I compared individuals close to eligibility to those who just met the requirements. I found an increase for women by 430 minutes/week, while there is no evidence of such an effect for men.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo