The rising child penalty in China

Xiaoyao Zhou, Jingjing Ye, Hao Li and Hongyan Yu

China Economic Review, 2022, vol. 76, issue C

Abstract: The falling female labor force participation rate in China has raised the attention of labor economists and policymakers. In light of this, this paper documents the changes in labor force participation of mothers relative to fathers around first births (referred as the “child penalty”) in China from 1982 to 2015 using a pseudo event study approach. Our findings show that child penalty for Chinese women has not only been steadily increasing, but also persists over years. This pattern cannot be solely explained by the lifted birth quota since the implementation of the one-child Policy. We further show that the increasing child penalty coincides with the decreasing number of public kindergartens after the state-owned enterprise (SOE) reform. Using a standard Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition approach, we also find evidence of a high percentage of child-related gender inequality in labor force participation.

Keywords: Child penalty; Gender gap; Female labor force participation; Family-planning policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 J12 J13 J16 O12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:chieco:v:76:y:2022:i:c:s1043951x22001274

DOI: 10.1016/j.chieco.2022.101869

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