Four Essays on the Political Economy of Care

A fundamental problem affecting Western contemporary capitalist societies is the crisis of care, or crisis of social reproduction (Fraser, 2023). Faced with increasing care needs due to an ageing societies, rising female labor force, welfare state retrenchment and a deterioration of working conditions coupled with a rise in functional inequalities, households have become simultaneously overstretched and under-resourced (Ferrera, 2013; Karabarbounis and Neiman, 2014; Baccaro and Howell, 2017). Indeed, the feminization of labor, in the two-fold sense of the growing presence of women in the labor market and the diffusion of working conditions once experienced only by marginalized groups (women, young workers and migrants) has produced a paradoxical outcome: on the one hand it has generated a direct source of demand for (typically low-wage) care jobs, and, on the other, it has reduced the income capacity for households to adapt to these changing care requirements (Dwyer, 2013; Manicardi, 2023). Care work, both unpaid and waged, has long been practically overlooked by rational choice theorists and gender economists. In time use analysis, the former is often treated as a residual category between paid work and leisure, or discussed only in relation to paid labor supply (Aguiar et al., 2013; Ngai et al., 2024), while the latter is most often discussed for its capacity to affect human capital endowments and for being performed in sectors with little scope for productivity improvements and innovation capacity (Nordhaus, 2006; Autor, 2015). The four chapters of the present thesis aim to articulate a political economy of care by theoretically investigating and empirically grounding its specificities to affirm that its organization is central to understanding labor supply, welfare state dynamics, and the evolution of low-wage employment. By integrating micro-level time use, macro-level public spending, theoretical frameworks from both feminist and gender economics traditions, and sectoral labor market dynamics, the thesis advances a micro applied perspective on the political economy of care in late capitalist societies. While empirically rooted in U.S. data, its findings uncover mechanisms and conclusions relevant beyond the national context.