The Heritage of WWII on Women’s Work: The Italian Case

We study the impact of World War II on women’s labor market outcomes in Italy, in the shorter- and the longer-run, using a novel dataset that combines information on war fatalities with employment records from the Italian Social Security Institute and Census data. To our knowledge, this is the first paper that analyzes the impact of WWII on female participation in the labor force in Italy. To conduct the analysis, we exploit the exogenous variation of male military fatalities at the provincial level. First, we estimate the short- and long-run effects of male soldiers’ mortality during the war on women’s labor force participation using a difference-in-differences analysis. Second, we test whether WWII had long-lasting effects on wages and the number of worked weeks in 1980-1997, the period covered by our administrative data sample of $385,000$ female workers. Our findings suggest that WWII had both an immediate and a persistent effect on female labor force participation and a long-run positive effect on worked weeks. In contrast, we do not find any evidence of a war impact on women’s wages.