Policy implication:
Supporting breastfeeding employees through
✔ flexible work
✔ suitable spaces and breaks
✔ reduced commuting pressures
could help mothers achieve their feeding goals.
#LabourEconomics #GenderEconomics #WorkAndFamily
Our results suggest that workplace constraints, not just preferences, play a major role in breastfeeding continuation.
Flexibility, time constraints, and facilities matter.
The effect varies substantially across jobs.
It is strongest for mothers who:
• cannot work from home
• have long commuting times
• work in sectors like retail, health, and education
Main result:
➡️ Returning to work reduces the probability of continuing breastfeeding by about 9–10 percentage points.
There is also evidence of anticipation effects: some mothers stop breastfeeding shortly before returning to work.
Using the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS), we follow mothers from childbirth until they return to work.
We estimate the effect of return to work using an event-study design.
We develop a simple economic framework where breastfeeding is a form of work performed alongside:
• paid work
• household work
• childcare
This highlights the time and workplace constraints mothers face.
Breastfeeding has well-documented benefits for both mothers and children.
But many mothers stop earlier than they intend — especially when they return to work.
We ask: how much does returning to work affect breastfeeding continuation?
📢 New WP!
“The Trade-off Between Breastfeeding and Returning to Work: The Role of Workplace Constraints”
with Fari Aftab, Sarah Jewell and Sam Rawlings www.iza.org/publications/dp/18427/the-trade-off-between-breastfeeding-and-returning-to-work-the-role-of-workplace-constraints
6/ Implication:
Even in organizations committed to equality and inclusion, gendered language norms and credibility stereotypes persist, shaping rewards, careers, and leadership dynamics. Paper open access link: doi.org/10.1016/j.eu...
5/ Methodological contribution:
We integrate linguistic annotation with econometric modeling to jointly analyze:
• evaluator gender
• employee gender
• gender-typed language in evaluations
→ allowing us to identify mechanisms, not just correlations.
4/ Key finding #3:
When women managers use agentive language to evaluate men, outcomes can backfire, reducing men’s likelihood of receiving top performance ratings.
This suggests a spillover form of backlash linked to status-incongruent leadership.
3/ Key finding #2:
Women evaluators must use substantially more agentive languagethan male evaluators to achieve similar positive evaluation outcomes for employees.
This highlights a persistent gender–competence stereotype in evaluative authority.
2/ Key finding #1:
Agentive language (e.g., assertive, competitive, independent) generates higher returns for women than for men in performance assessments—especially among high-performing women.
1/ We study how language gender stereotypes, pertaining to language, its users and its objects, shape the evaluations of employees. In a unique dataset of 1,054 evaluations annotated by expert linguists we identify agentive vs communal language.
📢📢📢New paper out now in European Economic Review: Gender stereotypes, language and performance with Sylvia Jaworska, Almudena Sevilla and Giovanni Razzu🧵
Excited to present Mine, Theirs or Ours? A Multi-Country Experiment on Citizens' Motivations to Invest in #MentalHealth today @cep-lse.bsky.social Event url:https://cep.lse.ac.uk/_new/events/event.asp?index=10481
HERB 2026 program: 📅 22 January 2026 – From Courtroom to Court of Public Opinion: Secondary Victimization and Intimate Partner Violence — Caterina Muratori (Autonomous University of Barcelona) – From Awareness to Action: Help-Seeking and Femicides after Gender-Based Violence Campaigns in Italy — Margherita Agnoletto (University of Turin & Collegio Carlo Alberto) – Rising Temperatures and Domestic Violence in Peru: Evidence and Mechanisms — Fiorella Parra-Mujica (Erasmus University Rotterdam) – After the Draft: The Lasting Effects of Male Conscription on Well-Being — Chiara Notarangelo (Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies) – Leader Identity and Cesarean Childbirths: Evidence from Random Allocations of Female Leaders in Indian Villages — Mujaheed Shaikh (Hertie School) – Qualitative Insights on the Income–Health Behavior Gradient — Manuela Puente-Beccar (Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods) 📅 23 January 2026 — 📍 Department of Economics, University of Bologna Session 3 (Chair: Ana Armendariz) – Health After Birth: The Persistent Health Penalty of Becoming a Parent — Jonathan Rossi (Erasmus University Rotterdam) – Precisely Zero: Migration’s Null Effect on Sex Crimes — Riccardo Ciacci (Universidad Pontificia Comillas) – Do Drug Consumption Rooms Reduce Drug-Related Hospitalisations? Evidence from Switzerland — Ana Armendariz (University of St Gallen) Session 4 (Chair: Flavia Cavallini) – Empowering Parents in the Digital Age — Margaux Suteau (London School of Economics and Political Science) – Children by Choice, Not Chance: Family Planning Associations and Fertility in Britain — Sara Tozzi (University of Bologna) – Expectation Shocks and Fertility: The Case of Brexit — Flavia Cavallini (Università della Svizzera italiana)
The program for the Health Economics and Risky Behaviors (HERB 2026) workshop is out! See you in Bologna!
eventi.unibo.it/workshop-her...
Meet today’s featured JMC in 2025 Econ Job Market Vlog: Iacopo Monterosa (@CollegioCA @unito), whose research interests are Political Economy and Applied Microeconomics.
🎥Check out his JMP video to learn more about his work: www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_u6...
#econsky #econjobmarket
On #internationaldayforthepreventionofviolenceagaistwomen we will be talking about effective strategies and their benefits to the whole society at Collegio Carlo Alberto, organised by Allievi
@andreamatranga.bsky.social
📢 #CallForPapers 7th Workshop on the Economics and Politics of Migration
CEPR @ebrd.bsky.social King's College London & Sapienza University are co-organising a workshop on 28-29 May 2026 in Rome
Submit by 23 January
cepr.org/events/7th-w...
@micheledimaio.bsky.social @plvezina.bsky.social #EconSky
@amoresi.bsky.social
@pietrobiroli.bsky.social @elisabaldazzi.bsky.social @giacomorosso.bsky.social @sjbeconobot.bsky.social 🥶
Elsevier has a 38% profit margin, and the other journal publishers aren't far behind.
A new generation, properly trained and empowered, can help reset expectations. Not by waiting for change from the top, but by bringing new norms into the system. It’s time to stop relying on the “bad apple” narrative. It’s the orchard, not the fruit, that needs tending.
If we train early-career researchers with clear rights and clear obligations, we build a generation that knows what to expect — and what to demand.
Because we failed to hold senior members of the profession accountable and that failure shapes the culture downstream.
Let me be specific: every graduate programme should include an Ethics of the Profession module. Not a token lecture, but a structured module covering:
• Professional conduct
• Research integrity
• Ethical collaboration and mentorship
• Teaching standards
The “bad apple” story has got a little stale.
We’ve spent years producing research on problems that are, in fact, systemic in #economics. We need a culture change movement across the profession. That movement has to start early. @aeacswep.bsky.social @resmedia.bsky.social @eeanews.bsky.social
Remember when Larry Summers made the lazy inference that fewer women in science means they must be less able? @mardelgiu.bsky.social and I wrote a paper exploring the consequences of this lazy inference for occupational segregation which we term the "Larry effect:" www.iza.org/publications...
@sjbeconobot.bsky.social