Lauro Carnicelli

I'm a researcher at Labore and Kela, and PhD candidate at the University of Helsinki.

Research

Work in Progress

• Effects of paternity leave reforms on the labour market and gender inequality (with Terhi Ravaska)
Using Finnish registry and social security data in a RDD framework we investigate the causal relationship between paternity leave reforms and the labour market outcomes of fathers and mothers. The Child's due date, which is random and out of the control of parents, is used as a running variable to create our control and treatment group. We study three parental leave reforms, from 2001, 2003, and 2010. The 2001 reform made the timing of paternity leave more flexible. The 2003 reform increased the total leave in 12 days while making the timing of the leave quite rigid. The last reform also increased the fathers' earmarked leave by 12 days but also gave families much more freedom to choose the timing of the paternity leave. The goals of these reforms were to increase fathers' participation on childcare and to reduce gender inequalities since mothers would almost exclusively take childcare responsibilities at the time. We investigate if the policies were successful by computing the short and long run effects of the reform on parents' employment rate, earnings, and how earnings are distributed within the household. The results suggest that flexibility is an important element to increase the take up of paternity leave. These policies were not effective to reduce gender disparities on the labour market. However, the 2010 reform increased the short-run mothers employment rate by 7%.


• Paternity leave expansions and family structure
Parental and paternity leave policies have been used in developed countries to promote gender equality and curb the child penalty. This article uses Finnish registry and social security data in a regression discontinuity setting to investigate if paternity leave expansion can affect marital stability and future fertility. The Child’s due date is used as a running variable, since it is not subject to precise manipulation by parents. The paternity leave reforms from 2001, 2003, and 2010 were analyzed. Preliminary results suggest that these policies had no significant impact on marriage stability. However, the 2010 reform reduced the short run fertility since the distance between siblings increased by around 0.23 years.

Working papers

• Financial shocks and endogenous labor market participation
This paper studies the effects of financial shocks on the labor market when participation in the labor force is endogenous. Previous research concerning endogenous participation produced models that generated a counterfactually procyclical unemployment rate and a positively sloped Beveridge curve. This paper shows that collateral constraints alone are not able to produce correlations in line with the data. However, financial shocks, that change the collateral requirements, are responsible for most of the movements on the labor market and generate a countercyclical unemployment and a negatively slopped Beveridge curve.

Reports

• 2022 - The impacts of union-led training on working conditions. Experimental evidence from Mozambique (with Tuomas Kosonen and Jukka Pirttilä)


• 2020 - Modeling Family Leave Policies (with Ohto Kanninen, Hannu Karhunen, Tuomas Kosonen and Terhi Ravaska)

Links

• CV
• Google scholar
• Ponte Preta
• Social media