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This paper investigates the relationship between health and labour market participation considering the potential role played by the presence of children and elderly persons (with/without disabilities) in Italian households.

The authors use longitudinal data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions and full-information maximum likelihood to estimate a two-equation model (one equation for labour force participation and one for health status) with instruments to address the endogeneity of the labour force participation choice. The model is estimated separately by gender.

The authors find that while the presence of children, elderly persons or both is positively associated with the health status of both genders, the presence of disabled elderly persons exerts a negative role. As for participation, interesting differences emerge. The presence of children discourages women's participation but is positively associated with men's labour force participation. Interestingly, a caring role for elderly persons without disability emerges for both genders when the presence of children is combined with that of elderly people. Gender differences are also at work for the role of childcare services and elderly and/or disabled home care/assistance.

The findings indicate a possible caring role for elderly persons without disabilities, neutralizing the effect of the presence of children on the labour force participation of both genders. The results also suggest that greater coverage of care services should increase the active participation of women in the labour market.

This paper evaluates how the first job when individuals entered the labor market affects the probability of youth being currently employed in formal or informal work in Bangladesh.

The analysis is based on data from the ILO School-to-Work Transition Surveys. The authors use a full-information maximum likelihood approach to estimate a two-equation model, which accounts for selection into the labor market when estimating the impact of entry status on current work outcomes. The main equation outcome follows a multinomial distribution thus avoiding a priori assumptions about the level of individual’s utility associated with each work status.

The authors find that entering the labor market in a vulnerable employment position (i.e. contributing family work or self-employment) traps into vulnerable employment and prevents the transition to both informal and, especially, formal paid work. This finding holds when accounting for endogeneity of the entry status and it is valid both in the short and in the long run. Young women are less likely to enter the labor market, and once entered they are less likely to access formal paid wok and more likely to being inactive than young men. Low education anticipates the entry in the labor market, but it is detrimental for future employment prospects.

The findings indicate the presence of labor market segmentation between vulnerable and non-vulnerable employment and suggest the endpoint quality of the school-to-work transition is crucial for later employment prospects of Bangladeshi youth.

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on transitions from the state of unemployment to that of employment and of inactivity in Italy and Spain.

First, the paper investigates the determinants of unemployment outflows in these two Mediterranean labour markets. Then, the paper examines discrepancies and similarities between specific outflow determinants, especially the interactions between gender and marital status, by comparing results obtained across countries.

The findings of the paper suggest that gender and marital status influence the probability of unemployment outflows in both countries, although not in the same way, especially with reference to marital status. Discrepancies also emerge in relation to the role of geographical area of residence.

International comparisons of unemployment outflows are rather new in the literature, and as far as we know none have been performed using European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions data. Further, although studies quite often examine the issue of gender-related labour mobility using the European Community Household Panel survey that took place in the 1990s (Arulampalam et al., 2007; Garcia Pérez and Rebollo Sanz, 2005; Theodossiou and Zangelidis, 2009), one of the main contributions of this paper is that it provides a systematic examination of the issue, considering the influence of gender and marital status differences on patterns of unemployment outflows to employment and inactivity.