Childbearing Risk, Job Sectors, and the Motherhood Wage Penalty

Shichao Du ()
Additional contact information
Shichao Du: The State University of New York

Population Research and Policy Review, 2023, vol. 42, issue 2, No 7, 19 pages

Abstract: Abstract Recent studies have advanced our knowledge of the motherhood wage penalty by expanding its temporal scope and adding a contextualized perspective. Unaddressed questions related to this advancement are whether the risk of childbearing causes a wage loss for mothers-to-be and whether the influence of childbearing risk varies across different job sectors. China’s “dandu policy,” whereby mothers are divided by their eligibility for a second child, creates a natural experiment to answer these questions. Using data from the China Family Penal Studies and employing the difference-in-difference approach, this study finds that, under a national-level pro-natalist policy, mothers who are at risk of a second child suffer a wage loss in the private sector, whereas this motherhood wage penalty does not appear in the public sector. The findings reveal that potential fertility, in addition to realized fertility, can lead to the motherhood wage penalty. This “potential fertility”—based motherhood wage penalty is highly dependent on job sectors.

Keywords: Childbearing risk; Potential fertility; Job sectors; Motherhood wage penalty; The “dandu child” policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11113-023-09763-5 Abstract (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:kap:poprpr:v:42:y:2023:i:2:d:10.1007_s11113-023-09763-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... es/journal/11113/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11113-023-09763-5

Access Statistics for this article

Population Research and Policy Review is currently edited by D.A. Swanson

More articles in Population Research and Policy Review from Springer, Southern Demographic Association (SDA)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().