On 28 September 2021, PHD Giorgia Menta has successfully defended her thesis « Essays on Human Capital, Inequality, and Income » (under the supervision of Prof. Conchita d’Ambrosio) and has been granted the title of Doctor. Her excellent work has also qualified her thesis for the “Best Thesis Award” 2020/2021.
We warmly congratulate herfor the great work she has accomplished during her PHD and wish her an as brilliant career.
Giorgia’s thesis abstract:
The thesis is divided in the following four chapters; as they address dierent research questions with dierent methods, each can be considered as a stand-alone paper.
Chapter 1 – Maternal Depression and Child Human Capital: A Genetic Instrumental Variable Approach. The Chapter addresses the causal relationship between maternal depression and child human capital using UK cohort data. We exploit the conditionally exogenous variation in mothers’ genomes in an instrumental-variable approach, and describe the conditions under which mother’s genetic variants can be used as valid instruments. An additional episode of maternal depression between the child’s birth up to age nine reduces both their cognitive and non-cognitive skills by 20 to 45% of a SD throughout adolescence. Our results are robust to a battery of sensitivity tests addressing, among others, concerns about pleiotropy and the maternal transmission of genes to her child.
Chapter 2 – Boys Don’t Cry (or Do the Dishes): Family Size and the Housework Gender Gap. Published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. We here use data from the British Cohort Study (BCS) to link family size to age-16 children’s contribution to household chores and the adult housework gender gap. Assuming that home production is an increasing function of family size and using an instrument to account for the endogeneity of fertility, we show that larger families have a dierent eect on boys and girls at age 16: girls in large families are significantly more likely to contribute to housework, with no eect for boys. We then show that childhood family size aects the housework gender gap between the cohort members and their partners at age 34. Women who grew up in larger families are more likely to carry out a greater share of household tasks in adulthood, as compared to women from smaller families. In addition, growing up in a large family makes cohort members more likely to sort into households with a wider housework gender gap as adults. We show that the persistent eect of family size is due to the adoption of behaviours in line with traditional gender roles: a lower likelihood of employment and shorter commutes for women, along with a higher employment probability for their partners.
Chapter 3 – Families at a Loss: The Relationship Between Income Changes and Child Human Capital The main scope of this paper is to assess the relationship and pathways that link gains and losses in family income to the cognitive and non-cognitive development of children. With data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study (MCS), I use a value added model to link distributional changes in family income to children’s reading scores and internalising and externalising behaviour trajectories between age 3 and 15. I find that only income losses have a significant negative impact on the non-cognitive development of children and that around one third of the eect operates through channels related to mental health and well-being of mothers. Instead, movements upwards and downwards the income 1 Preface distribution aect cognitive outcomes symmetrically. I find evidence suggesting that past income losses matter only in conjunction with current losses in explaining residualised reading test scores and that experiencing an income loss predicts the probability of entering the bottom quintile of the distribution of cognitive and non-cognitive skills. The evidence further suggests that the bottom quintile of non-cognitive skills is “stickier” than that of cognitive skills, with income gains having no significant eect in predicting the probability of exiting the bottom of the skills distribution.
Chapter 4 – Income and Wealth Volatility: Evidence from Italy and the U.S. in the Past Two Decades. Published in the Journal of Economic Inequality. Income volatility and wealth volatility are central objects of investigation for the literature on income and wealth inequality and dynamics. Here we analyse the two concepts in a comparative perspective for the same individuals in Italy and the U.S. over the last two decades. We find that in both countries wealth volatility reaches significantly higher values than income volatility, the eect being mostly driven by changes in the market value of real estate assets. We also show that there is more volatility in both dimensions in the U.S. and that the overall trend in both countries is increasing over time. We conclude by exploring volatility in consumption.