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This paper investigates the effect of parental separation on homelessness. Previous studies are limited in their ability to isolate this effect and can only provide descriptive evidence that parental separations relate to reductions in housing quality and stability. Using a unique dataset of disadvantaged Australians who provide retrospective information on parental separation and homelessness, we estimate bivariate duration models to examine transitions into homelessness resulting from parental separation. Controlling for observed as well as unobserved family and individual characteristics and exploiting the timing of events we investigate whether a causal relationship exists. Our results indicate that parental separation significantly increases the likelihood of experiencing homelessness in subsequent years for boys and girls if the separation occurred before the respondent was 12 years old. Parental separation occurring from the age of 12 only increases boys’ likelihood of becoming homeless, but not girls’.

This paper provides an empirical test of the rational addiction model, used in economics to model individuals' consumption of addictive substances, versus the utility misprediction model, used in psychology to explain the discrepancy between people's decision and their subsequent experiences. By exploiting a unique data set of disadvantaged Australians, we provide longitudinal evidence that a drop in life satisfaction tends to precede the use of illegal/street drugs. We also find that the abuse of alcohol, the daily use of cannabis and the weekly use of illegal/street drugs in the past 6 months relate to lower current levels of life satisfaction. This provides empirical support for the utility misprediction model. Further, we find that the decrease in life satisfaction following the consumption of illegal/street drugs persists 6 months to a year after use. In contrast, the consumption of cigarettes is unrelated to life satisfaction in the close past or the near future. Our results, though only illustrative, suggest that measures of individual's subjective wellbeing should be examined together with data on revealed preferences when testing models of rational decision-making.

This paper analyzes the source of the gender gap in third grade numeracy and reading. We adopt an Oaxaca-Blinder approach and decompose the gender gap in educational achievement into endowment and response components. Our estimation relies on unusually rich panel data from the Longitudinal Survey of Australian Children in which information on child development reported by parents and teachers is linked to each child's results on a national, standardized achievement test. We find that girls in low- and middle-SES families have an advantage in reading, while boys in high-SES families have an advantage in numeracy. Girls score higher on their third grade reading tests in large part because they were more ready for school at age four and had better teacher-assessed literacy skills in kindergarten. Boys' advantage in numeracy occurs because they achieve higher numeracy test scores than girls with the same education-related characteristics.

This paper studies the respective influence of intergenerational transmission and the environment in shaping individual trust. Focusing on second generation immigrants in Australia and the United States, we exploit the variation in the home and in the host country to separate the effect of the cultural background from that of the social and economic conditions on individual trust. Our results indicate that trust in the home country contributes to the trust of second generation immigrants in both host countries, but particularly so in the United States. Social and economic conditions in the host country, such as crime rate, economic inequality, race inequality and segregation by country of origin, also affect trust. Evidence for first generation immigrants confirms that the transmission of trust across generations is primarily important in the United States, and, that differences in trust levels between the two host countries increase with acculturation.

In this paper, we provide empirical evidence on the impact of IT diffusion on the stability of employment relationships. We document the evolution of the different components of job instability over a panel of 350 local labor markets in France, from the mid 1970s to the early 2000s. Although workers in more educated local labor markets adopt IT faster, they do not experience any increase in job instability. More specifically, we find no evidence that the faster diffusion of IT is associated with any change in job-to-job transitions, and we find that it is associated with relatively less frequent transitions through unemployment. Overall, the evidence goes against the view that the diffusion of IT has spurred job instability. Combining the local labor market variations with firm data, we argue that these findings can be explained by French firms' strong reliance on training and internal promotion strategies in order to meet the new skills requirement associated with IT diffusion.

This PhD dissertation studies the impact of number of children and of social interactions on mothers' labour supply. To determine the extent to which the link between number of children and mothers' labour supply is causal, we use two random events that affect the number of children: having same sex eldest siblings and twin births at the second pregnancy. Results suggest that having more than two children reduces mothers' participation in the labour market by 20 percentage points and the number of hours worked by employed mothers by 2 hours per week. We then analyze how the institutional context alters the effect of the number of children on mothers ‘participation in the labour market. First, we find that before 1994, when the Allocation parentale d'éducation was intended for parents of three children or more, having more than two children decreases significantly mothers' activity. After the extension of the benefit to mothers with two children, this is not the case anymore and the negative effect of having a second child on their activity is stronger. Second, our results indicate that in departments where the access of two-year-old children to pre-elementary public schools is low, having more than two children has a significant negative impact on mothers' activity. On the contrary, the effect is insignificant in departments where this access is high. We finally examine the effect of neighbourhood social interactions on mothers' activity. Mobilzing different exogenous sources of variation of close neighbours' activity, we find that neighbours' activity positively affects a mother's individual participation.; Cette thèse porte sur l'impact du nombre d'enfants et des interactions sociales de voisinage sur l'offre de travail des mères de famille. Nous proposons d'abord une étude sur la nature du lien entre nombre d'enfants et offre de travail des mères. Pour déterminer si cette relation est causale, nous utilisons deux évènements qui affectent aléatoirement le nombre d'enfants : le fait d'avoir deux aînés de même sexe et les naissances gémellaires de rang deux. Les résultats suggèrent qu'avoir plus de deux enfants diminue la participation des mères au marché du travail d'environ 20 points et le nombre d'heures travaillées par semaine d'environ 2 heures lorsqu'elles sont en emploi. Nous trouvons également que l'effet négatif du nombre d'enfants sur l'activité des mères est particulièrement marqué pour les mères peu diplômées. Nous affinons ensuite cette étude en étudiant comment le contexte institutionnel altère l'effet du nombre d'enfants sur la participation des mères au marché du travail. Premièrement, nous testons l'impact de l'extension de l'Allocation parentale d'éducation aux parents de deux enfants en juillet 1994 sur les termes de l'arbitrage entre fécondité et activité. Nous trouvons que lorsque l'Allocation parentale d'éducation est destinée aux parents ayant au moins trois enfants (avant la réforme), le passage de deux à trois enfants réduit significativement la participation des mères au marché du travail. Lorsque les mères de deux enfants sont éligibles (après la réforme), l'effet négatif d'avoir un deuxième enfant sur la participation des mères au marché du travail est accru, tandis qu'avoir plus de deux enfants n'a plus d'effet négatif sur la probabilité d'activité des mères. Deuxièmement, nous utilisons la variabilité des taux de scolarisation à deux ans en maternelle entre les différents départements pour identifier l'impact des possibilités de garde gratuite pour les enfants de moins de trois ans sur l'élasticité de l'activité des mères au nombre d'enfants. Les résultats indiquent que dans les départements où l'accès des enfants de deux ans à la maternelle est faible, avoir plus de deux enfants a un effet significativement négatif sur la participation des mères au marché du travail. Au contraire, dans les départements où l'accès des enfants de deux ans à la maternelle est élevé, avoir plus de deux enfants a un effet non significatif sur la participation des mères au marché du travail. Nous examinons ensuite l'effet des interactions sociales de voisinage sur la participation des mères au marché du travail. Nous utilisons différentes sources de variation exogène de la participation des proches voisines au marché du travail : le sexe de leurs aînés, le trimestre de naissance de leur deuxième enfant et la différence d'âge entre leurs deux aînés. Nous trouvons que la participation des voisines au marché du travail a un effet positif et significatif sur la participation individuelle d'une mère.