Marriage patterns and the gender gap in labor force participation: Evidence from Italy

The Italian rate of gender participation gap, defined as the differential between female and male rates of labor force participation, was 18.2% in 2020, the second highest among EU countries. In this paper, we present evidence highlighting a new possible determinant of this unbalance in the labor force: endogamy intensity. We define endogamy as “marriage within the community”, and we argue that it helps preserve and reinforce social norms stigmatizing working women, along with reducing the probability of divorce, which in turn disincentivizes women's participation in the labor force. We proxy the endogamy rate of a community by the degree of concentration of its surnames’ distribution, and we provide evidence that a more intense custom of endogamy contributed to enlarging gender participation gaps across Italian municipalities in 2001. In order to deal with endogeneity issues, we make use of an instrumental variable strategy, by instrumenting the endogamy measure of a municipality by the degree of ruggedness of its territory: the asperity of a municipality's surface indeed contributes to its geographical isolation, thus incentivizing in- marriage. In our main 2SLS result, a standard deviation increase in our proxy of endogamy is linked to roughly a 0.3 standard deviation increase in the gender participation gap of 2001. In addition, we provide evidence supporting our main hypothesis, documenting how higher rates of in-marriage are linked to the preservation of social norms and to greater marriage stability, with a lower probability of divorce.