Date/Time
Date(s) - 02/12/16
12:30 pm - 1:30 pm
Location
UNU-MERIT, Boschstraat 24, Maastricht (Room 0.16/0.17)
Categories
In the upcoming seminar, Dr. Marianna Battaglia will present “The effect of residential segregation on fertility of socially-excluded and marginalized ethnic Roma minorities”. The seminar will be held from 12:30-13:30 in room 0.16/0.17 of the UNU-MERIT building at Boschstraat 24. A sandwich lunch will be provided.
Abstract: In this seminar, we will discuss the effect of residential segregation on fertility for the socially excluded and marginalized Roma ethnic minority. Using original survey data collected in Serbia, we investigate whether fertility differs between more and less segregated neighborhoods and outline a model that helps to discriminate between competing mechanisms at play. Because of sorting, the ethnic composition of a neighborhood is instrumented by (il)legal possibility to build in the area at the time of its creation. Our results show that Roma in less segregated areas tend to have fewer children and exhibit a higher preference for having at least one boy. While birth spacing is not significantly different across neighborhoods after girls, after boys women in less segregated areas tend to take much more time before the next birth. A possible mechanism is that less segregated areas tend to be more exposed to the Serbian culture, in which fertility tends to be low.
Speaker biography: Dr. Marianna Battaglia is Assistant Professor of Economics at University of Alicante, Spain, since 2013. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from Bocconi University, Milan, Italy, in 2013 and her M.A. in Development Economics from the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. She has worked as consultant for Triple Line Consulting, c/o LSE Consortium Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and as research fellow for Nomisma S.p.A., Bologna, Italy. She has also worked as junior economist (internship) at IOM (International Organization for Migration), Mission Chile, Santiago de Chile, Chile. Her fields of interest are Development Economics, Economics of Education and Health, and Applied Econometrics, with a particular focus on minorities and migrants.