(Not) thinking about the future: inattention and maternal labor supply

Ana Costa-Ramón, Ursina Schaede, Michaela Slotwinski and Anne Brenøe

No 452, ECON - Working Papers from Department of Economics - University of Zurich

Abstract: The “child penalty” significantly reduces women’s lifetime earnings and pension savings, but it remains unclear whether these gaps are the deliberate result of forward-looking decisions. This paper provides novel evidence on the role of information constraints in mothers’ labor supply decisions. We first document descriptively that mothers are largely inattentive to the long-term financial consequences of reduced hours. In a large-scale field experiment that combines rich survey and administrative data, we then provide mothers with objective, individualized information about the long-run costs of reduced labor supply. The treatment increases demand for financial information and future labor supply plans, in particular among women who underestimate the long-term costs. Leveraging linked employer administrative data one year post-intervention, we observe that mothers who underestimate the long-term costs increase their labor supply by 6 percent over the mean.

JEL-codes: J16 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-dem, nep-exp, nep-ipr and nep-lab
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/262351/1/econwp452.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: (Not) Thinking about the Future: Inattention and Maternal Labor Supply (2024)
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:zur:econwp:452

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ECON - Working Papers from Department of Economics - University of Zurich Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Severin Oswald ().