The spacing of births and women's subsequent earnings - evidence from a natural experiment

Arizo Karimi

No 2014:18, Working Paper Series from IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy

Abstract: This paper analyzes the consequences of the spacing of births for women’s subsequent labor income and wages. Spacing births in longer intervals may allow women to re-enter the labor market between childbearing events, thereby avoiding expanded work interruptions and, in turn, reducing the negative effects of subsequent children. Based on arguably exogenous variation in birth spacing induced by pregnancy loss between the first two live births, the evidence provided in this paper supports this hypothesis and suggest that delaying the second birth by one year, on average, increases the probability of re-entering the labor market between births. Moreover, spacing births are found to increase both labor market participation and labor income over a long time period after second birth. Also long-run wages are positively affected, with a more pronounced effect for highly educated mothers.

Keywords: Child spacing; female wages; female lifetime earnings; natural experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J13 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2014-08-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ifau.se/Upload/pdf/se/2014/wp2014-18-Th ... sequent-earnings.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.ifau.se/Upload/pdf/se/2014/wp2014-18-The-spacing-of-births-and-women's-subsequent-earnings.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.ifau.se/Upload/pdf/se/2014/wp2014-18-The-spacing-of-births-and-women's-subsequent-earnings.pdf)

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:hhs:ifauwp:2014_018

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy IFAU, P O Box 513, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ali Ghooloo ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).