Letizia Mencarini
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 248451 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Letizia Mencarini |
| PRENOMES | Letizia |
| SOBRENOME | Mencarini |
| ASSINATURA | MENCARINI L |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Bocconi University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5070-6069 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 48 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 617 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 48 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2005 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 13 |
Family ideals in Italy and Spain
This study explores what constitutes an ideal family in Italy and Spain, questioning the prevailing view that they are homogenous and traditional family-oriented countries. Specifically, it investigates whether family ideals in Italy and Spain can be characterized as ‘traditional’ (i); whether family ideals are similar in the two counties (ii); and whether these ideals vary across gender and educational backgrounds (iii). To capture the multidime…
Women's Domestic Burden and Gendered Fertility Intentions in Italy
In Italy, the unequal distribution of household chores persists, disproportionately affecting women and potentially discouraging fertility intentions. This study explores the relationship between women's domestic burden and reproductive intentions, and how this relationship varies between men and women, depending on the parity achieved and the sex of the child (or children) they already had. The paper relies on data from 2016 ISTAT Survey on Fami…
Gendered Parenthood-Employment Gaps from Midlife
Women’s labor force participation has increased in Western countries, but gender gaps remain, especially among parents. Using a novel comparative perspective, we assess women’s and men’s employment trajectories from midlife onward by parity and education. We provide insights into the gendered parenthood-employment gaps examining the long-term implications of parenthood beyond the core childbearing ages by decomposing years lived between ages 40–7…
Generalised morality and contemporary fertility dynamics across European regions
This study focuses on the concept of generalised morality (GM), a cultural trait measured with the values of respect, obedience, generalised trust and control. Since GM drives economic prosperity and the way nations organise their welfare, we investigate how it matters for contemporary fertility trends. We consider the period between 2000 and 2014, when divergent fertility trends in Europe arose and the Great Recession took place. Using Eurostat …
The Last Bastion is Falling
The study makes use of the 2016 Household Multipurpose Survey of Family, Social Subjects, and Life Cycle to demonstrate that family-related behavior is now rapidly changing in Italy. The country is often taken as a stronghold of traditionalism. We, instead, highlight recent and substantial changes in cohabitation, dissolution, and nonmarital fertility in the country. In doing so, we carefully assess the predictions made by the Second Demographic …
Covid-19 Policy Interventions and Fertility Dynamics in the Context of Pre-Pandemic Welfare Support
This paper focuses on nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to explain fertility dynamics during the pandemic, while considering countries' institutional context. We argue that containment policies disrupted people's lives and increased their uncertainty more in countries with weak welfare support systems, while health-related and economic support NPIs mitigated such disruptions much more there, as they were less expected by citizens. We estimat…
Remittances-Adjusted Support Ratio
We introduce a new demographic indicator, the remittances-adjusted support ratio (RASR), which incorporates the support offered through remittances into the existing support ratio (SR). Remittances have increased rapidly in recent decades due to improved technology, and they play a crucial role in the countries that send migrants abroad. This is important as many countries are still undergoing their demographic transitions, and here remittances a…
Her class and his class
This work explores the association between fertility behaviour and occupational social classes, over and above educational and income resources. We use European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) data, pooling the longitudinal component for fourteen countries between 2005 and 2017. We compare the effect of the female partner's social class with that of the male partner on the likelihood of having a child, distinguishing be…
Does bribery increase maternal mortality? Evidence from 135 Sub-Saharan African regions
About 295,000 women died globally during and following pregnancy and childbirth in 2017. Two-thirds of these deaths occurred in Sub-Saharan Africa. By linking individual and regional data from 135 regions in 17 Sub-Saharan African countries over the period 2002–2018 this study explores how bribery affects maternal mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa. Our results show that the percentage of people who had first-hand experience in bribery is significan…
Satisfaction with work–family roles and the relationship with working parents’ life satisfaction
In this paper, we provide an innovative conceptualization of the work–family balance, and its implications for mothers’ and fathers’ life satisfaction, by drawing on ‘Self Determination Theory’ and ‘Job Demand-Control–Support’ model for the ‘basic psychological needs’ in partnership, parenting, and work. We analyse whether work and family satisfaction have different meanings for mothers and fathers, and whether it has equal importance in determin…
What Tears Couples Apart
This study contributes to the literature on union dissolution by adopting a machine learning (ML) approach, specifically Random Survival Forests (RSF). We used RSF to analyze data on 2,038 married or cohabiting couples who participated in the German Socio-Economic Panel Survey, and found that RSF had considerably better predictive accuracy than conventional regression models. The man's and the woman's life satisfaction and the woman's percentage …
The association between Covid-19 policy responses and mental well-being
Employment uncertainty and fertility intentions
The role of employment uncertainty as a fertility driver has previously been studied with a limited set of constructs, leading to inconclusive results. We address this oversight by considering perceived stability of employment and perceived resilience to potential job loss as two key dimensions of employment uncertainty in relation to fertility decision-making. The present study relies on the 2017 Italian Trustlab survey and its employment uncert…
Early assessment of the relationship between the Covid-19 pandemic and births in high-income countries
Drawing on past pandemics, scholars have suggested that the COVID-19 pandemic will bring about fertility decline. Evidence from actual birth data has so far been scarce. This brief report uses data on vital statistics from a selection of high-income countries, including the United States. The pandemic has been accompanied by a significant drop in crude birth rates beyond that predicted by past trends in 7 out of the 22 countries considered, with …
A first glance into the black box of life satisfaction surrounding childbearing
The vast majority of studies looking into the relationship between childbearing and subjective well-being use overall measures where respondents either report their general level of happiness or their life satisfaction, leaving substantial doubt about the underlying mechanisms. However, life satisfaction and happiness are intuitively multidimensional concepts, simply because there cannot be only one aspect that affects individuals' well-being. In…
Trust and fertility in uncertain times
Recent studies have shown higher uncertainty to be associated with fertility decline. This study considers the role of social trust as a coping mechanism when general uncertainty increases. We analyse the fertility data of Italian provinces from 2004 to 2013, thereby incorporating the period of economic recession, which unexpectedly and exogenously increased uncertainty across the population. We find a robust and significantly positive impact of …
How the internet increases modern contraception uptake
BACKGROUND: Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries have the highest worldwide levels of unmet need for modern contraception. This has led to persistently high fertility rates in the region, rates which have had major adverse repercussions on the development potential there. Family planning programmes play a key role in improving the uptake of modern contraception, both by fostering women's health and by lowering their fertility. Increasing awareness…
The impact of gynecologists' conscientious objection on abortion access
Although abortion in Italy is free of charge and legal in a broad set of circumstances, 71% of gynecologists are registered as conscientious objectors, i.e. they are exempted from performing abortions for reasons of religious or moral beliefs. To assess whether this practice limits abortion access, we analyze aggregate regional data on abortion and a dataset of over one million clinical records of single interventions performed between 2002 and 2…
Happy parents' tweets
Demographers are increasingly interested in connecting demographic behaviour and trends with 'soft' measures, i.e., complementary information on attitudes, values, feelings, and intentions
Does income moderate the satisfaction of becoming a parent? In Germany it does and depends on education
Parents' subjective well-being after their first child and declining fertility expectations
Recent studies have suggested a decline in subjective well-being after the birth of a first child. Yet parents' subjective well-being is, in general, linked positively to wanting and to having additional children
Employed Women and Marital Union Stability
A new strand of studies has called into question standard microeconomic predictions of a positive association between women's economic independence and marital union dissolution. We investigate whether and how the gender division of labor channels the impact of women's employment on marital union disruption, utilizing data on heterosexual couples from the 2003 and 2007 waves of the Italian nationally representative 'Family and Social Subject' sur…
The gender division of housework after the first child
In our study, we adopt a comparative-longitudinal perspective on the gender division of housework before and after the birth of the first child, exploiting the first two waves of the Gender and Generation Survey and comparing three countries belonging to different gender and welfare regimes (i.e. Bulgaria, France and the Netherlands). We find that childrearing everywhere triggers a re-traditionalisation, generating a more inegalitarian gender div…
The cultural foundations of happiness
Fertility and Life Satisfaction in Rural Ethiopia
Despite recent strong interest in the link between fertility and subjective well-being, the focus has centered on developed countries. For poorer countries, in contrast, the relationship remains rather elusive. Using a well-established panel survey—the Ethiopian Rural Household Survey (ERHS)—we investigate the empirical relationship between fertility and life satisfaction in rural Ethiopia, the largest landlocked country in Africa. Consistent wit…
Gender Differences in Time Use over the Life Course in France, Italy, Sweden, and the US
This contribution analyzes how men and women in France, Italy, Sweden, and the United States use their time over the life cycle and the extent to which societal and institutional contexts influence the gender division of labor. In order to test the hypothesis that contextual factors play a crucial role in shaping time allocation, this study considers countries that diverge considerably in terms of welfare state regime, employment and paid working…
Childless or Childfree? Paths to Voluntary Childlessness in Italy
This article investigates childlessness in Italy. Trends in childlessness are presented and compared with trends elsewhere in Europe. Different paths to childlessness are outlined, using data from a survey carried out among childless women aged 40-44 in five Italian cities in 2002. Individual characteristics of the childless and reasons for childlessness are investigated. As many as one-third of the interviewees who live with a partner and do not…
Desperate Housework
This article investigates cross-national patterns in the gender division of housework in coresident couples. By using Generations and Gender Survey (GGS) data, we assess four key hypotheses proposed in the literature: namely, the relative resources approach (the partner who earns less does more housework), the time availability perspective (the partner who spends less time doing paid work does more housework), the economic dependency model (the p…
Gender equity and fertility intentions in Italy and the Netherlands
Fertility levels have fallen drastically in most industrialized countries. Diverse theoretical and empirical frameworks have had difficulty in explaining these unprecedented low levels of fertility. More recently, however, attention has turned from cla
European Sociological Review
Journal Article European Sociological Review Get access European Sociological Review, Volume 27, Issue 4, August 2011, Page i2, https://doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcr061 Published: 30 July 2011
Labor and Love
We theorize how social policy affects marital stability vis-à-vis macro and micro effects of wives' employment on divorce risk in 11 Western countries. Correlations among 1990s aggregate data on marriage, divorce, and wives' employment rates, along with attitudinal and social policy information, seem to support specialization hypotheses that divorce rates are higher where more wives are employed and where policies support that employment. This is…
Institutional Change, Happiness, and Fertility
Building on existing theories of fertility dynamics, this article provides a theoretical perspective that connects two recent strands of the literature. The first concerns gender equity and equality where institutions play a critical role. The second is that subjective well-being matters in explaining childbearing behaviour (and vice versa). Our key argument is that subjective well-being is a direct function of the discrepancy between aspirations…
Happiness, Housework and Gender Inequality in Europe
Although the last few decades have seen a progressive increase of gender equality in almost all dimensions of society, roles concerning childcare and domestic work remain highly gender-specific. Gender division of labour within the family varies considerably within and across countries. Gender systems are likely to have an important impact on individuals’ well-being. Improved gender equality has enhanced the general well-being of women, although …
Childbearing and well-being
Fertility rates in contemporary Europe have reached dramatically low levels. In light of this we are interested in the extent to which childbearing events may worsen individuals’ material well-being. Using a sample of women drawn from the European Community Household Panel Survey, we make a comparison of the impact of childbearing on well-being using a welfare-regime classification. Recognizing that poverty status is a poor proxy for well-being, …
What is your couple type? Gender ideology, housework sharing, and babies
It is increasingly acknowledged that not only gender equality but also gender ideology plays a role in explaining fertility in advanced societies. In a micro perspective, the potential mismatch between gender equality (i.e., the actual sharing taking place
Childlessness and Support Networks in Later Life
Childlessness is an increasingly common condition in many European societies. The consequences that this demographic phenomenon might have on welfare systems-and long-term care policies in particular-are widespread. This is particularly the case for the familistic welfare states of Southern Europe. Using data from the 2003 Italian GGS, the article explores the relation between the absence of children and support received in later life. Overall, t…
Employment uncertainty and fertility intentions
The role of employment uncertainty as a fertility driver has previously been studied with a limited set of constructs, leading to inconclusive results. We address this oversight by considering perceived stability of employment and perceived resilience to potential job loss as two key dimensions of employment uncertainty in relation to fertility decision-making. The present study relies on the 2017 Italian Trustlab survey and its employment uncert…
Trust and fertility in uncertain times
Recent studies have shown higher uncertainty to be associated with fertility decline. This study considers the role of social trust as a coping mechanism when general uncertainty increases. We analyse the fertility data of Italian provinces from 2004 to 2013, thereby incorporating the period of economic recession, which unexpectedly and exogenously increased uncertainty across the population. We find a robust and significantly positive impact of …
High Fertility or Childlessness
Les estimations récentes de la fécondité des générations italiennes nées après 1960 révèlent une forte augmentation de la proportion de femmes sans enfant et une proportion élevée de mères ayant un seul enfant. Le groupe des femmes dont la parité est la plus basse (0 ou 1 enfant) est donc désormais plus nombreux que celui des mères de deux enfants. L?objectif de cet article est de dégager le profil des femmes qui n?ont pas reproduit la norme domi…
The Parenthood Happiness Puzzle
Albania
For a very long time, Albania has had one of the highest levels of fertility in Europe: in 2002 the total fertility rate of 2.2 children per woman was the highest in Europe. Although this current level is high, the country has experienced a rapid ferti
The gender division of housework after the first child
In our study, we adopt a comparative-longitudinal perspective on the gender division of housework before and after the birth of the first child, exploiting the first two waves of the Gender and Generation Survey and comparing three countries belonging to different gender and welfare regimes (i.e. Bulgaria, France and the Netherlands). We find that childrearing everywhere triggers a re-traditionalisation, generating a more inegalitarian gender div…
What Tears Couples Apart
This study contributes to the literature on union dissolution by adopting a machine learning (ML) approach, specifically Random Survival Forests (RSF). We used RSF to analyze data on 2,038 married or cohabiting couples who participated in the German Socio-Economic Panel Survey, and found that RSF had considerably better predictive accuracy than conventional regression models. The man's and the woman's life satisfaction and the woman's percentage …
The association between Covid-19 policy responses and mental well-being
Work–Family Conflict Moderates the Relationship Between Childbearing and Subjective Well-Being
Youth poverty and transition to adulthood in Europe
There is an increasing amount of research focussing on the transition to adulthood, a stage of the life cycle where young people face demanding life decisions, including completion of education, finding stable employment, and establishing their househo
Covid-19 Policy Interventions and Fertility Dynamics in the Context of Pre-Pandemic Welfare Support
This paper focuses on nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to explain fertility dynamics during the pandemic, while considering countries' institutional context. We argue that containment policies disrupted people's lives and increased their uncertainty more in countries with weak welfare support systems, while health-related and economic support NPIs mitigated such disruptions much more there, as they were less expected by citizens. We estimat…
Employed Women and Marital Union Stability
A new strand of studies has called into question standard microeconomic predictions of a positive association between women's economic independence and marital union dissolution. We investigate whether and how the gender division of labor channels the impact of women's employment on marital union disruption, utilizing data on heterosexual couples from the 2003 and 2007 waves of the Italian nationally representative 'Family and Social Subject' sur…
The Last Bastion is Falling
The study makes use of the 2016 Household Multipurpose Survey of Family, Social Subjects, and Life Cycle to demonstrate that family-related behavior is now rapidly changing in Italy. The country is often taken as a stronghold of traditionalism. We, instead, highlight recent and substantial changes in cohabitation, dissolution, and nonmarital fertility in the country. In doing so, we carefully assess the predictions made by the Second Demographic …
Intergenerational Proximity and the Fertility Intentions of Married Women
Explanations for very low fertility in ‘strong family’ countries emphasise the relatively high costs of childrearing but pay little attention to the potentially offsetting influences of distinctive living arrangements. In this paper, we use data from nationally representative surveys of married women of reproductive age in Japan and Italy to demonstrate that intergenerational co-residence and residential proximity to parents(-in-law) are positive…
Childbearing and well-being
Fertility rates in contemporary Europe have reached dramatically low levels. In light of this we are interested in the extent to which childbearing events may worsen individuals’ material well-being. Using a sample of women drawn from the European Community Household Panel Survey, we make a comparison of the impact of childbearing on well-being using a welfare-regime classification. Recognizing that poverty status is a poor proxy for well-being, …
High Fertility or Childlessness
Les estimations récentes de la fécondité des générations italiennes nées après 1960 révèlent une forte augmentation de la proportion de femmes sans enfant et une proportion élevée de mères ayant un seul enfant. Le groupe des femmes dont la parité est la plus basse (0 ou 1 enfant) est donc désormais plus nombreux que celui des mères de deux enfants. L?objectif de cet article est de dégager le profil des femmes qui n?ont pas reproduit la norme domi…
Youth poverty and transition to adulthood in Europe
There is an increasing amount of research focussing on the transition to adulthood, a stage of the life cycle where young people face demanding life decisions, including completion of education, finding stable employment, and establishing their househo
Familles nombreuses et couples sans enfant
Les estimations recentes de la fecondite des generations italiennes nees apres 1960 revelent une forte augmentation de la proportion de femmes sans enfant et une proportion elevee de meres ayant un seul enfant. Le groupe des femmes dont la parite est la plus basse (0 ou 1 enfant) est donc desormais plus nombreux que celui des meres de deux enfants. L’objectif de cet article est de degager le profil des femmes qui n’ont pas reproduit la norme domi…
Similarities and differences between two cohorts of young adults in Italy
The paper analyses the results of a CATI survey, consisting on a representative national sample of 3083 young people of two different generations: the 23-27th and the 33-37th in the first half of 2004. The analysis is particularly targeted at the oldes
Marital Disruption and Economic Well-Being
Though there is a considerable literature concerned with the economic consequences of marital breakdown, there is still substantial disagreement in terms of its magnitude. One of the major problems underlying this debate is how economic well-being is defined. We implement several measures of well-being of monetary and multidimensional nature by using data from the European Community Household Panel. Another issue in this literature concerns selec…
Childless or Childfree? Paths to Voluntary Childlessness in Italy
This article investigates childlessness in Italy. Trends in childlessness are presented and compared with trends elsewhere in Europe. Different paths to childlessness are outlined, using data from a survey carried out among childless women aged 40-44 in five Italian cities in 2002. Individual characteristics of the childless and reasons for childlessness are investigated. As many as one-third of the interviewees who live with a partner and do not…
Albania
For a very long time, Albania has had one of the highest levels of fertility in Europe: in 2002 the total fertility rate of 2.2 children per woman was the highest in Europe. Although this current level is high, the country has experienced a rapid ferti
Gender equity and fertility intentions in Italy and the Netherlands
Fertility levels have fallen drastically in most industrialized countries. Diverse theoretical and empirical frameworks have had difficulty in explaining these unprecedented low levels of fertility. More recently, however, attention has turned from cla
A Portrait of Children in Immigrant Families in Italy
Intergenerational Proximity and the Fertility Intentions of Married Women
Explanations for very low fertility in ‘strong family’ countries emphasise the relatively high costs of childrearing but pay little attention to the potentially offsetting influences of distinctive living arrangements. In this paper, we use data from nationally representative surveys of married women of reproductive age in Japan and Italy to demonstrate that intergenerational co-residence and residential proximity to parents(-in-law) are positive…
Gender Differences in Time Use over the Life Course in France, Italy, Sweden, and the US
This contribution analyzes how men and women in France, Italy, Sweden, and the United States use their time over the life cycle and the extent to which societal and institutional contexts influence the gender division of labor. In order to test the hypothesis that contextual factors play a crucial role in shaping time allocation, this study considers countries that diverge considerably in terms of welfare state regime, employment and paid working…
European Sociological Review
Journal Article European Sociological Review Get access European Sociological Review, Volume 27, Issue 4, August 2011, Page i2, https://doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcr061 Published: 30 July 2011
Leaving Mum Alone? The Effect of Parental Separation on Children’s Decisions to Leave Home
Happiness, Housework and Gender Inequality in Europe
Although the last few decades have seen a progressive increase of gender equality in almost all dimensions of society, roles concerning childcare and domestic work remain highly gender-specific. Gender division of labour within the family varies considerably within and across countries. Gender systems are likely to have an important impact on individuals’ well-being. Improved gender equality has enhanced the general well-being of women, although …
Labor and Love
We theorize how social policy affects marital stability vis-à-vis macro and micro effects of wives' employment on divorce risk in 11 Western countries. Correlations among 1990s aggregate data on marriage, divorce, and wives' employment rates, along with attitudinal and social policy information, seem to support specialization hypotheses that divorce rates are higher where more wives are employed and where policies support that employment. This is…
Desperate Housework
This article investigates cross-national patterns in the gender division of housework in coresident couples. By using Generations and Gender Survey (GGS) data, we assess four key hypotheses proposed in the literature: namely, the relative resources approach (the partner who earns less does more housework), the time availability perspective (the partner who spends less time doing paid work does more housework), the economic dependency model (the p…
Childlessness and Support Networks in Later Life
Childlessness is an increasingly common condition in many European societies. The consequences that this demographic phenomenon might have on welfare systems-and long-term care policies in particular-are widespread. This is particularly the case for the familistic welfare states of Southern Europe. Using data from the 2003 Italian GGS, the article explores the relation between the absence of children and support received in later life. Overall, t…
Afterword
What is your couple type? Gender ideology, housework sharing, and babies
It is increasingly acknowledged that not only gender equality but also gender ideology plays a role in explaining fertility in advanced societies. In a micro perspective, the potential mismatch between gender equality (i.e., the actual sharing taking place
Institutional Change, Happiness, and Fertility
Building on existing theories of fertility dynamics, this article provides a theoretical perspective that connects two recent strands of the literature. The first concerns gender equity and equality where institutions play a critical role. The second is that subjective well-being matters in explaining childbearing behaviour (and vice versa). Our key argument is that subjective well-being is a direct function of the discrepancy between aspirations…
The Parenthood Happiness Puzzle
Work–Family Conflict Moderates the Relationship Between Childbearing and Subjective Well-Being
The cultural foundations of happiness
Fertility and Life Satisfaction in Rural Ethiopia
Despite recent strong interest in the link between fertility and subjective well-being, the focus has centered on developed countries. For poorer countries, in contrast, the relationship remains rather elusive. Using a well-established panel survey—the Ethiopian Rural Household Survey (ERHS)—we investigate the empirical relationship between fertility and life satisfaction in rural Ethiopia, the largest landlocked country in Africa. Consistent wit…
Sociology (39 obras) · Economics (33 obras) · Demography (31 obras) · Demographic economics (29 obras) · Population (28 obras) · Psychology (26 obras) · Family Dynamics and Relationships (23 obras) · Fertility (22 obras) · Political science (21 obras) · Intergenerational Family Dynamics and Caregiving (19 obras)