TY - JOUR AU - Giavazzi,Francesco AU - Schiantarelli,Fabio AU - Serafinelli,Michel TI - Culture, Policies and Labor Market Outcomes JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 15417 PY - 2009 Y2 - October 2009 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15417 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15417.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Francesco Giavazzi Universita' Bocconi and IGIER Via Guglielmo Rontgen, 1 Milan 20136 ITALY Tel: 0039-02-5836-3304 Fax: 0039-02-5836-3302 E-Mail: francesco.giavazzi@unibocconi.it Fabio Schiantarelli Department of Economics Boston College 140 Commonwealth Avenue Chestnut Hill, MA 02467 Tel: 617-5524512 Fax: 617-5522308 E-Mail: schianta@bc.edu Michel Serafinelli Department of Economics University of California, Berkeley 508-1 Evans Hall # 3880 Berkeley, CA 94720-3880 E-Mail: serafine@econ.berkeley.edu AB - We study whether cultural attitudes towards gender, the young, and leisure are significant determinants of the evolution over time of the employment rates of women and of the young, and of hours worked in OECD countries. Beyond controlling for a larger menu of policies, institutions and structural characteristics of the economy than has been done so far, our analysis improves upon existing studies of the role of "culture" for labor market outcomes by dealing explicitly with the endogeneity of attitudes, policies and institutions, and by allowing for the persistent nature of labor market outcomes. When we do all this we find that culture still matters for women employment rates and for hours worked. However, policies and other institutional or structural characteristics are also important. Attitudes towards youth independence, however, do not appear to be important in explaining the employment rate of the young. In the case of women employment rates, the policy variable that is significant along with attitudes, is the OECD index of employment protection legislation. For hours worked the policy variables that play a role, along with attitudes, are the tax wedge and unemployment benefits. The quantitative impact of these policy variables is such that changes in policies have at least the potential to undo the effect of variations in cultural traits on labor market outcomes. ER -