Ravazzini, Laura

2019-10-29, Brulé, Gaël, Ravazzini, Laura, Suter, Christian

2018-11-29, Ravazzini, Laura, Suter, Christian

Currently, the debate of national statistical offices and scholars working on poverty is on how to include wealth in the classical measure of income poverty. Holding the income-poverty threshold fixed, some studies show that wealth-corrected poverty rates of the elderly are much more affected than those of the rest of the population. In addition, the decline in poverty rates for the elderly is higher when the value of the household’s main residence is included than when only non-housing wealth is taken into account. However, as the main residence is difficult to sell to foster consumption, it remains questionable whether this component should be added in the measurement of the risk of poverty. Difficult choices that remain to be made in the creation of a composite measure of poverty based on income and wealth are not only which components and which poverty threshold should be used, but also which methodology to aggregate income and wealth and which equivalence scale to adjust for different household members should be applied. This contribution focuses specifically on this last issue of equivalence scales highlighting how this methodological choice changes the risk of poverty among the elderly. The analysis is run with CH-SILC 2015 and on its specific module on wealth. Results show how methodological choices change the risk of poverty for different age groups in a significant way.

2018-6-1, Ravazzini, Laura, Chesters, Jenny

Although the gender gap in incomes has been extensively researched, scant attention has been paid the gender wealth gap. This paper compares the gender wealth gap in Australia with that of Switzerland. Using data from the 2010 Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) and the 2012 Swiss Household Panel (SHP), we find that the gender wealth gap can be attributed to differences in permanent income and education. Furthermore, the gender wealth gap is much larger in Switzerland than in Australia. We link this finding to the type of wealth held by individuals in these two countries. Differences in wealth accumulation among women in Switzerland and Australia are likely to be linked to the housing market and to family policies for (single) mothers.

2017-12-11, Ravazzini, Laura, Kuhn, Ursina, Suter, Christian

This paper addresses homogamy and assortative mating in Switzerland. The empirical analysis monitors trends for education and hourly wages using the Swiss Labour Force Survey and the Swiss Household Panel. The analysis disentangles the effects of educational expansion from mating patterns and incorporates not only couples, but also singles. Results show an increasing level of assortative mating both for education and for wages. For wage homogamy, selection is more important than adaptation.

2019, Ravazzini, Laura, Piekalkiewicz, Marcin, Bianco, Adele, Conigliaro, Paola, Gnaldi, Michela

Income comparisons are often performed through the construction of reference groups. These groups are highly dependent on the sociodemographic characteristics collected by survey data. Gender is usually included in these characteristics only when the number of cases is large enough to have separate samples for women and men. So far, there has been no empirical proof on the fact that comparisons are within or between people of the same sex. With the support of specific questions collected in three waves of the pretest of the German Socio-Economic Panel, this study analyses income comparisons within and between gender groups. Results suggest that income comparisons are mainly within people of the same sex. On average, women compare more than men independently from the gender composition of the sector of employment. Despite the predominance of within-gender comparisons, between-gender comparisons exist. Regressions that test the effect of income comparisons and reference groups on subjective well-being are indeed better explained when gender is not included as a characteristic for the construction of reference groups.

2018-11-1, Ochsner, Michael, Ravazzini, Laura, Gugushvili, Dimitri, Fink, Marcel, Grand, Peter, Lelkes, Orsolya, van Oorschot, Wim

2018-1-1, Ravazzini, Laura

Fuelled by federal stimuli of 440 million Swiss francs, the staggered expansion of childcare in many cantons allows the evaluation of this family policy on female labour supply. With new cantonal data, this study analyses both the decision to participate in the labour market and the intensity of participation. Empirical results of difference-indifferences regressions show that mothers who live in cantons that have expanded their childcare services more than the national average work at higher percentage rates. The reform stimulated part-time employment of between 20 and 36 hours per week by 2 percentage points. The expansion of childcare particularly affected women with two children and upper-secondary education, who are married or cohabit with their partner.

2019, Brulé, Gaël, Ravazzini, Laura, Suter, Christian, Brulé, Gaël, Suter, Christian

2018-6-1, Simona, Jehane, Ravazzini, Laura

At the beginning of the 2000s, Switzerland went through two global recessions: the Dot-com crisis and the Great Recession. Even though it experienced milder effects compared to its European neighbours, Swiss unemployment increased considerably compared to its status quo. This paper aims to explore the resilience of vulnerable groups to these economic downturns using both objective (income poverty and material deprivation) and subjective (wellbeing and satisfaction with the financial situation) indicators of quality of life. To analyse how quality of life evolved since the early 2000s, we use a longitudinal database: the Swiss Household Panel. When both objective and subjective indicators were used, our results suggest that the dot-com crisis had a stronger negative effect on vulnerable groups. This was particularly true with regards to single parents and large families who experienced a marked decline when assessed using objective indicators. Disadvantaged groups during the first crisis reacted in different ways during the second crisis. Some groups (the unemployed, the low-educated and the solo self-employed) experienced some scarring effects; others were resilient and continued with their normal trends (migrants and the young) or registered an improvement in their conditions (single parents and large families). Single parents are the group that performed better during and after the Great Recession according to both objective and subjective indicators.

2018, Ravazzini, Laura, Kuhn, Ursina, Tillman, Robin, Voorpostel, Marieke, Farago, Peter