Michele Battisti gratefully acknowledges financial support for this project by the Leibniz Association (SAW-2012-ifo-3). The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

This paper analyzes the role of family structure in the gender gap in children's time investment in studying and non-cognitive skills. We focus on Italy, a country that, similar to many other OECD countries, is experiencing both an increasing number of single-parent families (most of which are headed by mothers) and an increasing gender gap in children's cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes. By using a difference-indifferences specification comparing children's outcomes in singleversus two-parent families for boys compared to girls, we analyze the differential effect across gender of living with a single mother on both the amount of time spent studying and the amount of effort put into studying. Our analysis suggests that living in a single-mother family has a more detrimental effect on boys, though all childrenregardless of genderreceive fewer parental inputs if they live with a single mother. The greater detrimental effect of living with a single mother for boys seems to be driven by less educated, less well-off families or families with working mothers.

SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research at DIW BerlinThis series presents research findings based either directly on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel study (SOEP) or using SOEP data as part of an internationally comparable data set (e.g. CNEF, ECHP, LIS, LWS, CHER/PACO). SOEP is a truly multidisciplinary household panel study covering a wide range of social and behavioral sciences:

This paper estimates the eect of immigrants on the women-men gap in retirement and working decisions. We focus on the eect that operates through immigrants' supply of domestic labor, which substitutes women's household services especially in the care of elderly parents. We use a dataset of Italian households that contains information on planned retirement age, labor supply and family structure for a representative sample in the years [2000][2001][2002][2003][2004][2005][2006][2007][2008]. A double dierence identication approach exploits the women-men dierences between families with and without old parents, interacted with the supply of immigrants in the local labor market. We nd that an increase of immigrants by one percentage point of the local population is associated with an increase in the planned retirement age gap between women and men by 0.45 years if they had a living parent over 80. Such dierential was instead only 0.17 if the household had no living old parent. The eect found is stronger for poor or less educated women and particularly correlated with the inow of Eastern European female immigrants, the group supplying the largest share of labor for domestic care.

This paper investigates how co-ethnic networks affect the economic success of immigrants. Using longitudinal data of immigrants in Germany and including a large set of fixed effects and pre-migration controls to address the possible endogeneity of initial location, we find that immigrants in districts with larger co-ethnic networks are more likely to be employed soon after arrival. This advantage fades after four years, as migrants located in places with smaller co-ethnic networks catch up due to greater human capital investments. These effects appear stronger for lower-skilled immigrants, as well as for refugees and Ethnic Germans.