Children and Career Interruptions: The Family Gap in Denmark

By Nabanita Datta Gupta, Nina Smith. Social Science Research Network, 2002

324 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The effect of children and career interruptions on the family gap is analysed based on longitudinal data covering the years 1980-1995. The estimated model controls for unobserved time-constant heterogeneity. The results show that when controlling for unobserved heterogeneity, the negative effect of children on mothers' wages disappear, but there are large differences between educational groups and the public and private sector. The main effect of children seems to be a loss of human capital accumulation during child-birth periods. Beside this, there is no indication that children have long term effects on the earnings potential of their mothers.

Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a01b5750ac143bcb818981ebc3dce8a8c2105944

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Citations in the corpus

Does the Gap in Family-friendly Policies Drive the Family Gap? (2004, unknown): “Various attempts have been made to explain the family gap in general and the child-penalties in particular (Waldfogel (1998), Budig & England (2001), Phipps et al. (2001), Datta Gupta & Smith (2002)).”
Parental Leave—Possibility or Trap? Does Family Leave Length Effect Swedish Women’s Labour Market Opportunities? (2011, background): “…here the effect is smaller for women than for men.3 In a study on Danish data, which controlled for unobserved time-constant heterogeneity, Datta Gupta and Smith (2002) found no lasting negative effect of children on women’s wages apart from the effect caused by reduced labor market experience.”
Swimming Upstream, Floating Downstream: Comparing Women's Relative Wage Progress in the United States and Denmark (2006, methodology): “Datta Gupta et al. (2000) used a decomposition methodology and showed that if prices in the private sector had been applied in the public sector, the overall gender wage gap would have been about 3 percentage points lower in 1994.”
PERSPECTIVE ARTICLE: The impact of Nordic countries’ family friendly policies on employment, wages, and children (2008, methodology): “Datta Gupta and Smith (2002) show that despite there not being a permanent effect of career interruptions on the family pay gap, there is a tendency for all women to have a flatter wage profile during the child bearing age when controlling for observable factors.”
Maternity Leave Legislation, Female Labor Supply, and the Family Wage Gap (2007, unknown): “…for this is that German firms find it increasingly costly to keep the same job available the longer a woman stays away from work, and assign her 19See e.g. Albrecht et al. (1999) for Sweden, Datta Gupta and Smith (2002) for Denmark, and Light and Ureta (1995) and Spivey (2005) for the US.”
Labour Force Participation of Women: Empirical Evidence on The Role of Policy and Other Determinants in OECD Countries (2004, background): “A recent Danish study, however, reports a (progressive) catch-up of mothers’ salary to those of childless women, as they compensate for their lack of human capital accumulation (Gupta and Smith, 2002).”