 Mothers’ caregiving during COVID: The impact of marital property laws on women’s labor force statusCynthia Bansak, Shoshana Grossbard and Ho-Po Crystal Wong Economics & Human Biology, 2022, vol. 47, issue C Abstract: If mothers take care of children more than fathers, then after the onset of COVID-19 mothers’ employment is expected to drop more than that of fathers. This gender gap is likely to be larger where women are less concerned about the financial repercussions of opting out of the labor force, and therefore the gender gap in employment is likely to grow more where community property or homemaking provisions give more protection to homemakers in case of union dissolution. Difference-in-differences and dynamic study estimations applied to CPS data for 2019–2020 show that after the onset of COVID-19 the labor force participation of mothers of school-age children—but not of fathers--dropped more in states with marital property laws more generous to parental caregivers. These results stand in contrast to how these groups’ labor force participation changed after the Great Recession, compared to pre-recession levels. Keywords: COVID; Labor supply; Gender gap; Marital property laws (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ehbiol:v:47:y:2022:i:c:s1570677x22000661 DOI: 10.1016/j.ehb.2022.101170 Access Statistics for this article Economics & Human Biology is currently edited by J. Komlos, Inas R Kelly and Joerg Baten More articles in Economics & Human Biology from Elsevier |
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