Motherhood Employment Penalty and Gender Wage Gap Across Countries: 1990–2010

Yu-Wei Chu, Harold E. Cuffe and Nguyen Doan

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: In this paper, we use twin birth as an instrument to estimate the effects of fertility on female labor force participation using 70 censuses from 36 countries in 1990–2010. We document a strong relationship between the gender wage gap and the size of the motherhood penalty. The penalty is smallest in countries with small gender wage gaps. Both cross- and within-country relationships between motherhood penalty and gender wage gap remain strong and negative even when we condition on per-capita GDP and educational attainment. Our estimates suggest that a reduction of 1-percentage-point in the gender wage gap is associated with a decrease of 0.45–0.65 percentage-points in the estimated motherhood employment penalty.

Keywords: Child penalty; female labor supply; family size; gender wage gap; twin birth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J13 J16 J18 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-04-24
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem and nep-gen
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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