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This paper analyses the relationship between female labour market participation and mortgage commitments in a life-cycle set up. In particular, it examines whether a mortgage qualification constraint has any effect on female labour market participation. This is done by conditioning on the mortgage decision in a labour market participation equation for married women. Endogeneity of the mortgage variable is tested using house price data. Panel data from the British Household Panel Study is used in order to control for unobserved heterogeneity in participation. Summary• This paper analyses the relationship between female labour participation and mortgage commitments in a life-cycle set up for UK households.• It is important to study the relationship between labour supply and mortgagerelated liquidity constraints because housing represents the biggest component of household assets in the UK and because of the existence of an explicit constraint related to labour income when the mortgage is taken out.• The data used are from the British Household Panel Survey for the years 1993-2000, and the working sample is made of women aged 25-40, in couples, whose husband works full-time. Self-employed individuals and renters are excluded from the analysis.• Estimation is performed by means of a fixed effect logit model, which means that individual unobserved heterogeneity can be controlled for without imposing any structure on the correlation between this and the explanatory variables. In this specific context, it is important to allow individual preference towards work to be correlated with mortgage decisions.• It is found that mortgage commitments, as captured by the ratio between monthly mortgage payment and household income excluding female's earned income, have a positive effect on female participation, at least up to age 34. However, the negative effect on female participation of having a young child is very strong and the combined effect of children and mortgage commitments on participation can stay negative.

We estimate marginal propensities to consume from wealth shocks for Italian households in the early part of the Great Recession. Large asset price shocks in 2008 underpin an IV estimator. A euro fall in risky financial wealth resulted in cuts in annual total (non-durable) consumption of 8.5-9 (5.5-5.7) cents. There is evidence of effects on food spending. Responses of total and nondurable spending to changes in housing wealth are 0.2 to 0.3 cents/euro. Point estimates of the effect of the financial wealth shock are larger if the youngest and/or oldest households are excluded. Results indicate that responses to the wealth shock were stronger for those who became pessimistic about the stock market, and for those owners of risky assets who also held mortgage debt. Counterfactuals indicate financial wealth effects were important (relative to other factors) for consumption falls in Italy in 2007/08.