Grandmothers and the gender gap in the Mexican labor market

Miguel Talamas Marcos

Journal of Development Economics, 2023, vol. 162, issue C

Abstract: This paper estimates the effect of childcare availability on parents’ employment probability using the timing of the grandmothers’ death – the primary childcare provider in Mexico – as identifying variation. I use a triple-difference to disentangle the effect of coinhabiting grandmothers’ deaths due to their impact on childcare from their effects due to alternative mechanisms. Through their impact on childcare availability, grandmothers’ deaths reduce mothers’ employment rate by 12 percentage points (27 percent) and do not affect fathers’ employment rate. The negative effect on mothers’ employment is smaller where public daycare is more available, or private daycare or schools are more affordable.

Keywords: Gender gap; Triple-difference; Motherhood penalty; Childcare; Mexico (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D10 J16 J22 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304387822001559
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Grandmothers and the Gender Gap in the Mexican Labor Market (2022)
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:eee:deveco:v:162:y:2023:i:c:s0304387822001559

DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2022.103013

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Development Economics is currently edited by M. R. Rosenzweig

More articles in Journal of Development Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().