Child Penalties and Financial Incentives: Exploiting Variation along the Wage distribution

Pierre Pora and Lionel Wilner

No 2019-17, Working Papers from Center for Research in Economics and Statistics

Abstract: We relate women's labor earnings losses due to motherhood to their prechildbirth rank in the distribution of hourly wages. Using French administrative data, we show that these \child penalties" decrease steeply along the distribution; by contrast, the related hourly wage losses are fairly homogeneous. Low-wage mothers opt out of the labor market or reduce their working hours more frequently; the magnitude of such responses is consistently monotonic along the distribution. This empirical evidence highlights the relevance of financial incentives and suggests that child penalties arise from decisions based on specialization gains rather than on gender differences in preferences or on gender norms.

Keywords: Gender pay gap; child penalties; labor supply; difference-in-difference; wage distribution. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J13 J16 J22 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 89 pages
Date: 2019-09-27
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-eur, nep-gen and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Working Paper: Child Penalties and Financial Incentives: Exploiting Variation along the Wage Distribution (2019)
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