 Child Penalties in Labour Market SkillsJonas Jessen, Lavinia Kinne and Michele Battisti No 11874, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Abstract: Child penalties in labour market outcomes are well-documented: after childbirth, employment and earnings of mothers drop persistently compared to fathers. Beyond gender norms, a potential driver could be the loss in labour market skills due to mothers' longer employment interruptions. This paper estimates child penalties in adult cognitive skills by adapting the pseudo-panel approach to a single cross-section of 29 countries in the PIAAC dataset. We find a long-term drop in numeracy skills after childbirth of 0.12 standard deviations for fathers and a 0.06 standard deviations larger drop for mothers with the difference being marginally significant. Estimates of child penalties in skills strongly depend on controlling for pre-determined characteristics, especially education. Additionally, there is no evidence for worse occupational skill matches for mothers after childbirth. Our findings suggest that changes in general labour market skills can at best explain a small fraction of child penalties in labour market outcomes, and that a cross-sectional estimation of child penalties can be sensitive to characteristics of the outcome variable. Keywords: child penalty; cognitive skills; gender inequality; PIAAC (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_11874 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC. |
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