# (24%).

Demographic and labor-force participation descriptive statistics for mothers and fathers are shown in Tables 2 and 3, respectively. These tables include variables such as parent’s age, age at first birth, years of education, household size, residential region and indicators for religion among others. The labor-force participation variables are based on questions concerning the employment status of the parent during the last 7 days and 30 days previous to the moment of the surveys. The four surveys (LSMS and DHS) contain labor supply indicator variables which measure whether the parents worked for somebody other than a household member ( _worked off-farm_ ), whether they worked on a farm owned by a household member ( _worked on-farm_ ) and whether the parents worked on own account ( _self-employed_ ). It is important to notice that these working activities are not exclusive, which means that each parent might be doing more than one. Thus, I define another indicator variable that combines these three variables and takes the value of 1 if the parents performed at least one of these working activities during the last 7 days ( _worked in last 7 days_ ) and 0 otherwise.

Just the LSMS surveys also contain other labor supply variables that measure whether the parents have a _second occupation_ , their usual number of _hours worked per week_ and also their amount of _labor income per month_ in old leks.<sup>13</sup> The latter two variables are set to zero for those parents who reported not working during the last 7 days.

The descriptive statistics in Tables 2 and 3 indicate that the mean age is 35 for the sample of mothers and almost 40 for the fathers (husbands or partners of mothers). On average, women become mothers at the early age of 23 compared to 28 for men. Parents in Albania complete a similar number of years of education, being 10 years for the mothers and 11 for the fathers. Half of the households in the sample live in urban areas and around 38% of them live in an extended family.

About 44.5% of the mothers with at least two children were working during the last 7 days previous to the surveys, whereas this number rises up to 78.7% for the sample of fathers. This difference of 34.2 percentage points in favor of labor-force participation of men reflects their much more active involvement in the labor market of Albania. In addition, fathers are much more likely of having a second occupation (5.8%) compared to mothers (1.4%). From the sample of mothers with at least two children, 16.3% were _working off-farm_ , 21.7% were _working on-farm_ and only 6.6% were _self-employed_ . While, for the husbands or partners of mothers, 39.3% were _working off-farm_ , 23.6% were _working on-farm_ and 19.7% were working on own account. The summary statistics indicate that men in Albania dominate in the non-agricultural sector, while women make up a higher proportion of employed persons in the agricultural sector.

Overall (i.e., including zeros), the average number of _hours worked per week_ is 16.6 among the mothers, but it is 40 hours among those that effectively work. On the other hand, fathers

> 13The 2002 and 2005 LSMS surveys also contain information on the number of _weeks worked per year_ , but unfortunately this variable is not availabe for the rest of the surveys and for this reason it is not used as an additional dependent variable in this study

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