Three essays in applied labour economics

This dissertation is made up by three self-contained chapters whose common feature is the fact that they are essays in applied labour economics. My research is characterized by an interdisciplinary approach. In what follows I investigate classical economic issues putting them in connection with other disciplines, such as sociology, psychology and pedagogy. The research questions have been inspired by pressing contemporary issues such as migration, religion, advancing maternal age and unemployment. The first chapter, "Does unemployment challenge religious affiliation? Evidence from European countries", is a joint work with my supervisor Prof. Luca Nunziata. In this paper we exploit the increase in the unemployment rate that has followed the recent financial crisis in order to assess the effect of unemployment on the level of religiosity in European countries. The results indicate that the increase in unemployment has been associated with an increase in religiosity in predominantly Catholic regions, while predominantly Protestant regions have suffered a decrease in the level of religiosity among their population. The second chapter, "The transferability of skills across borders: The case of immigrants and self employment," is a single-authored paper that investigates the self employment experience of immigrants in the United States, focusing on two main aspects. First, we explore the differences between the activities performed by immigrant and native self employed in order to assess whether the status of immigrant poses some limitations to the range of occupations carried out by non-native individuals. As a second aspect, the paper investigates the importance of past experience as self employed in the home country in predicting the labour market position of individuals after migration. The analysis points out that the self employment experiences of immigrants are usually different from those of natives, but what is even more important in defining the kind of activity performed by individuals is their ethnicity. In the second part of the paper we find that previous experiences as incorporated entrepreneurs in the home country increase the probability of being in a similar position after migration to the United States. Contrarily there are no evidence that previous experiences as non incorporated self employed increase the probability of being self employed in the foreign market (neither incorporated nor unincorporated). Finally, the third chapter, "The effects of late motherhood on children school achievement: Evidence from the NCDS", is again a single-authored paper that focuses on the effects of advanced maternal age at delivery on children school outcomes. Resorting to dummy variables that identify children born to mothers that were below and above 38 years old at delivery, we perform OLS first and hence PSM. What we find is that boys born to older mothers have a disadvantage at school entry that is reflected in lower scores in the reading and arithmetic tests performed at 7 years old. There are mild evidence suggesting that the worse outcomes could persist at age 11, but these are driven by the initial disadvantage that has not been completely recovered by this age. In line with this fading effect hypothesis, we find no statistically significant coefficients when we compare the school performances of children born to younger and older mothers at age 16.