Child penalty estimation and mothers' age at first birth

Valentina Melentyeva and Lukas Riedel

No 25-033, ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

Abstract: We show that the widespread approach to estimate the career costs of motherhood - so called "child penalties" - is prone to produce biased results, as it pools first-time mothers of all ages without accounting for their differences in characteristics and outcomes. We propose a novel method building on the recent advances in the difference-in-differences literature to address this issue. Applied to German administrative data, our method yields 30 percent larger post-birth earnings losses than the conventional approach. We document meaningful effect heterogeneity by maternal age in both magnitude and interpretation, highlighting its key role in understanding the impact of motherhood.

Keywords: child penalty; maternal labor supply; heterogeneous treatment effects; event study (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 J13 J16 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-eur, nep-inv and nep-lab
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https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/321862/1/1930383045.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Child Penalty Estimation andMothers Age at First Birth (2025)
Working Paper: Child Penalty Estimation and Mothers' Age at First Birth (2025)
Working Paper: Child Penalty Estimation and Mothers’ Age at First Birth (2023)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:zewdip:321862

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