Linnea Nelli (p), Maria Enrica Virgillito

Izaskun Barba Areso

The Covid-19 crisis has been defined as a “She-recession” because of its disproportionate
impact on female employment, by contrast to past recessions, specifically the
Great Recession, defined as “Man-recessions” for the usual disproportionate impact
on male employment. Lock down measures have impacted mostly sectors with interpersonal
contact which are female dominated, while school closures have increased the
childcare burden for women in general, also for women working remotely implying reductions
of working hours and resignations more than for their male partners. The
roots of the Sherecession can be found in the persistency of gender differences on the
labour market, especially for Italy. Employment and participation rates for women
are slightly above 50%, the distribution of occupations is persistently segregated with
concentration of female employment in service and low-value added sectors and mostly
medium-low professional status; employed with part-time and fixed-term contracts.
This is particularly true for women from Southern Italy, where such features of the
labour market are exacerbated and deep asymmetries from women from other regions
can be detected. Indeed, female structural unemployment in the South is more than
twice the rate from different regions. This paper aims to identify and analyse the long
term sources of the Sherecession to explain the peculiar impact of the Covid-19 crisis
on female employment on the Italian labour market. By a revised key statistic originally
developed by Fazzari and Needler (2021), we measure the severity of job losses
during the Covid-19 crisis and and their persistency. We control for both education
level and geographical dimension. We find that the impact of the Covid-19 crisis has
been more than proportional for women, for low educated female workers and working
in the South during 2020.

References
[1] Titan Alon, Sena Coskun, Matthias Doepke, David Koll, and Mich`ele Tertilt. From
mancession to shecession: Women’s employment in regular and pandemic recessions.
Technical report, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2021.
[2] Armanda Cetrulo, Dario Guarascio, and Maria Enrica Virgillito. Working from home
and the explosion of enduring divides: Income, employment and safety risks. Technical
report, LEM Working Paper Series, 2020.
[3] Steven M Fazzari and Ella Needler. Us employment inequality in the great recession
and the covid-19 pandemic. European Journal of Economics and Economic Policies:
Intervention, 18(2):223–239, 2021.

Alina Sorgner (p)

Linnea Nelli

This paper investigates the role of natural disasters in gender disparities in regional labor markets and entrepreneurship for the case of Italy. The empirical analysis is based on the detailed data on earthquakes in Italy provided by the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV), which cover the time period from 1005 until 2015 and contains information about the location and intensity of each earthquake that happened during this period of time. This data is merged with the most recent Census data from the year 2011, which provides official statistics about the main socio-demographic and economic characteristics of the population in Italian provinces. The results suggest that natural disasters have pronounced significant effects on gender disparities in regional labor markets in Italy. In particular, regions that experienced more intensive earthquakes in the past tend to have more pronounced gender gaps in labor force participation rates, while the effect is particularly strong for gender differences in regional self-employment rates. This is consistent with the recent literature emphasizing that female population is more vulnerable to natural disasters. Moreover, additional results suggest that regional gender disparities seem to persist over longer periods of time, but they tend to decrease in the absence of repeating natural disasters. The results suggest that natural disasters are an important driver of gender gaps in labor market outcomes including entrepreneurship that has largely been ignored in the previous literature. This has important implications for policy makers aiming at promoting gender equality and female entrepreneurship, especially, in regions that tend to have a high risk of natural disasters.

Raquel Simón Albert (p), Matías Mayor, José Manuel Casado, Hipólito Simón

Alina Sorgner

This paper examines the effect that Labour Market Areas’ characteristics have on female employment rates in Spain to identify which regional aspects favour or hamper the good labour performance of this group. It address this issue in a novel way by using geographical units coded according to the commuting flows of workers, the Labour Markets Areas (LMA), and by considering the possible existence of spatial relationships between markets through the use of spatial econometric techniques. This type of techniques considers the possibility that individuals' decisions are not only conditioned by the contextual factors associated with the market in which they reside but also by the evolution and situation of their environment. The use of these methods combined with the use of functional areas and a rich data source, such as the 2011 Population and Housing Census, allows us to delve deeper into the behaviour of these phenomena and to obtain results that will be relevant when formulating public policy recommendations.
The evidence obtained shows that female employment rates follow a process of local spatial dependence, being influenced not only by the characteristics of the market itself but also by the characteristics and shocks derived from neighbouring regions. Among the territorial characteristics that have a positive impact on the female employment rate, results highlight the higher proportion of women with a university education, while a higher proportion of women between 40 and 50 years has a negative influence. These characteristics, also observed as relevant in neighbouring markets, highlight the existence of an imitation effect between markets. This spatial pattern also shows that there are certain relationships of a broader nature which origin can’t be identified but that could derive from the important regulatory influence of the Autonomous Communities, or the presence of a greater similarity between the closest markets in economic or cultural terms, among others. All in all, the evidence shows the relevance in adopting an adequate territorial approach that consider geographical discrepancies and the possible diffusion effect between regions in order to implement employment policies.

Vicente Ríos Izaskun, Barba Areso (p), Lisa Gianmoena, Pedro Pascual

Raquel Simón Albert

This study investigates whether an increase in women's political empowerment is associated with better air quality outcomes. Women display stronger environmental concerns and are more likely to engage in pro-environmental behaviors than men, which may translate into better air quality outcomes as more women progressively break the glass ceiling in politics. To test this hypothesis, we employ a novel data set on air pollutant emissions and women's political empowerment for a sample of 230 European regions of 27 EU countries. We apply instrumental variables and partial identiffcation methods to ensure that our results are not influenced by confounding variables.
Our empirical analysis reveals that female political empowerment leads to better air quality. Moreover, we find that the observed positive relationship between women's empowerment and air quality is robust to a variety of changes in the empirical setup. Taken together, our results suggest that the observed positive link between women
empowerment and air quality in Europe is likely to be causal.