Child Penalties and Financial Incentives: Exploiting Variation along the Wage Distribution

Pierre Pora and Lionel Wilner

Documents de Travail de l'Insee - INSEE Working Papers from Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques

Abstract: We relate women's labor earnings losses due to motherhood to their pre-childbirth rank in the distribution of hourly wages. Using French administrative data from 2005 to 2015, we show these "child penalties" to decrease steeply along the distribution; by contrast, related hourly wage losses are pretty homogeneous. Low-wage mothers opt out or decrease their working hours more frequently; the magnitude of such responses is completely monotone along the distribution. This empirical evidence highlights the relevance of financial incentives and suggests that child penalties arise from decisions based on the gains of specialization, rather than on gender differences in preferences or on gender norms.

Keywords: Gender pay gap; child penalties; labor supply; difference-in-difference; wage distribution. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J13 J16 J22 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem and nep-eur
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.bnsp.insee.fr/ark:/12148/bc6p06zrh4k/f1.pdf Document de travail de la DESE numéro G2019/08 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Dissecting child penalties (2024)
Working Paper: Child Penalties and Financial Incentives: Exploiting Variation along the Wage distribution (2019)
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:nse:doctra:g2019-08

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Documents de Travail de l'Insee - INSEE Working Papers from Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by INSEE ().