The emergence of the motherhood premium: recent trends in the motherhood wage gap across the wage distribution

Eunhye Kwak ()
Additional contact information
Eunhye Kwak: Korea Labor Institute

Review of Economics of the Household, 2022, vol. 20, issue 4, No 9, 1323-1343

Abstract: Abstract This paper estimates recent trends in the motherhood wage gap (MWG) across the female wage distribution and explores several drivers of the trend. The result shows that the large convergence of the MWG observed on average is a high-quantile phenomenon. Maternal relative wages sharply increase at the upper wage quantiles in the mid-1990s, leading to a reversed MWG (motherhood premium) since the mid-2000s. This positive selection into motherhood among high-wage women comes from mothers who live with a husband, who have first births in their late ages, and who work for long hours. The MWG has narrowed over time with widening wage dispersion among mothers, and the MWG trend is associated with changing fertility patterns and high-wage mothers’ working hours.

Keywords: Motherhood wage gap; Motherhood premium; Unconditional quantile regression (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J11 J13 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11150-021-09594-3 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:reveho:v:20:y:2022:i:4:d:10.1007_s11150-021-09594-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/11150/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11150-021-09594-3

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Economics of the Household is currently edited by Shoshana Grossbard

More articles in Review of Economics of the Household from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().