Pregnancy or motherhood cost? A comparison of the child penalty for adopting and biological parents

Philip Rosenbaum

Applied Economics, 2021, vol. 53, issue 29, 3408-3422

Abstract: This study investigates whether the high labour market costs of having children for women can be explained by the associated biological costs. Estimating the significance of biological factors requires separating the effects of having a child from the effects of giving birth to a child. This separation is estimated by comparing child penalties between biological and adopting families. Adopting mothers neither go through pregnancy nor nursing, thus lessening the burden of the sex-specific costs of having children. I apply an event study by following parents over 16 years and find large and significant child penalties for all mothers although the penalties are slightly smaller for adopting mothers than those for biological mothers. Neither adopting nor biological fathers experience any child penalties. The results suggest that child penalties have some biological components, but the burden is on women regardless of whether they carry the biological costs related to pregnancy.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00036846.2021.1881431 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:applec:v:53:y:2021:i:29:p:3408-3422

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RAEC20

DOI: 10.1080/00036846.2021.1881431

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Economics is currently edited by Anita Phillips

More articles in Applied Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().