IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cca/wplabo/113.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The lifetime gender gap in Italy. Do the pension system countervails labour market outcomes?

Author

Listed:
  • Roberto Leombruni
  • Michele Mosca

Abstract

In Italy large work career gender gaps currently exists, particularly regarding wages and activity rates. The paper investigates the issue looking at lifetime incomes, where from the one side all the career gaps tend to accumulate, from the other the redistribution acted by the pension system may mitigate the differences. Exploiting an original database on the entire work careers, we document how the pay gap constantly opens with age and how women tend to cumulate lower seniority. Both gaps have an impact in the pension calculation, so that the day after retirement gender differences are even higher. By means of a microsimulation model we show that the pension system partially countervails labour market outcomes, implying lower differences in lifetime incomes. However, due to the current transition to an actuarially neutral system, the effect is going to vanish in following decades, posing some concerns about future prospects of gender income inequality.

Suggested Citation

  • Roberto Leombruni & Michele Mosca, 2011. "The lifetime gender gap in Italy. Do the pension system countervails labour market outcomes?," LABORatorio R. Revelli Working Papers Series 113, LABORatorio R. Revelli, Centre for Employment Studies.
    • Handle: RePEc:cca:wplabo:113
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.laboratoriorevelli.it/_pdf/wp113.pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Roberto Leombruni & Matteo Richiardi, 2006. "LABORsim: An Agent-Based Microsimulation of Labour Supply – An Application to Italy," Computational Economics, Springer;Society for Computational Economics, vol. 27(1), pages 63-88, February.
    2. Ghazala Azmat & Maia Güell & Alan Manning, 2006. "Gender Gaps in Unemployment Rates in OECD Countries," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 24(1), pages 1-38, January.
    3. Arellano, F. Alfonso, 2005. "Evaluating the effects of labour market reforms at the margin on unemployment and employment stability: the Spanish case," UC3M Working papers. Economics we051205, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Departamento de Economía.
    4. Del Boca, Daniela & Sauer, Robert M., 2009. "Life cycle employment and fertility across institutional environments," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 53(3), pages 274-292, April.
    5. Alan Manning & Joanna Swaffield, 2008. "The gender gap in early-career wage growth," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 118(530), pages 983-1024, July.
    6. Claudia Olivetti & Barbara Petrongolo, 2008. "Unequal Pay or Unequal Employment? A Cross-Country Analysis of Gender Gaps," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 26(4), pages 621-654, October.
    7. Laura Hospido, 2009. "Gender differences in wage growth and job mobility of young workers in Spain," Investigaciones Economicas, Fundación SEPI, vol. 33(1), pages 5-37, January.
    8. Kunze, Astrid, 2002. "Gender Differences in Entry Wages and Early Career Wages," IZA Discussion Papers 626, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).
    9. Favaro, Donata & Magrini, Stefano, 2008. "Group versus individual discrimination among young workers: A distributional approach," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 37(5), pages 1856-1879, October.
    10. Adriano Paggiaro & Enrico Rettore & Ugo Trivellato, 2009. "The Effect of a Longer Eligibility to a Labour Market Programme for Dismissed Workers," LABOUR, CEIS, vol. 23(1), pages 37-66, March.
    11. Del Bono, Emilia & Vuri, Daniela, 2011. "Job mobility and the gender wage gap in Italy," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 18(1), pages 130-142, January.
    12. Nopo, Hugo R. & Daza, Nancy & Ramos, Johanna, 2011. "Gender Earnings Gaps in the World," IZA Discussion Papers 5736, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).
    13. Giuseppe Costa & Roberto Leombruni & Matteo Richiardi, 2008. "Aspettative di vita, lavori usuranti e equità del sistema previdenziale. Prime evidenze dal Work Histories Italian Panel," LABORatorio R. Revelli Working Papers Series 75, LABORatorio R. Revelli, Centre for Employment Studies.
    14. William E. Even & David A. Macpherson, 1994. "Gender Differences in Pensions," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 29(2), pages 555-587.
    15. Roberto Leombruni & Claudia Villosio, 2005. "Employability of Older Workers in Italy and Europe," LABORatorio R. Revelli Working Papers Series 43, LABORatorio R. Revelli, Centre for Employment Studies.
    16. Martin Schindler, 2009. "The Italian Labor Market; Recent Trends, Institutions, and Reform Options," IMF Working Papers 09/47, International Monetary Fund.
    17. Elena Bardasi & Stephen P. Jenkins, 2010. "The Gender Gap In Private Pensions," Bulletin of Economic Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 62(4), pages 343-363, October.
    18. Daniela Del Boca & Silvia Pasqua & Chiara Pronzato, 2005. "Fertility and Employment in Italy, France, and the UK," LABOUR, CEIS, vol. 19(s1), pages 51-77, December.
    19. Michele Belloni & Carlo Maccheroni, 2013. "Actuarial Fairness When Longevity Increases: An Evaluation of the Italian Pension System," The Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance - Issues and Practice, Palgrave Macmillan;The Geneva Association, vol. 38(4), pages 638-674, October.
    20. Sami Napari, 2006. "The Early Career Gender Wage Gap," CEP Discussion Papers dp0738, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cca:wplabo:113. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Giovanni Bert). General contact details of provider: http://edirc.repec.org/data/fccaait.html .

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.