Child Penalties Across Countries: Evidence and Explanations

By H. Kleven, Camille Landais, J. Posch, Andreas Steinhauer, Josef Zweimüller. AEA Papers and Proceedings, 2019

541 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper provides evidence on child penalties in female and male earnings in different countries. The estimates are based on event studies around the birth of the first child, using the specification proposed by Kleven et al. (2018). The analysis reveals some striking similarities in the qualitative effects of children across countries, but also sharp differences in the magnitude of the effects. We discuss the potential role of family policies (parental leave and childcare provision) and gender norms in explaining the observed differences.

Subfields: Accounting, Demography, Gender Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dcb3b5d76754f956c13c9f0f2048c6c018e9768a

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Citations in the corpus

Gender gaps in labor informality: The motherhood effect (2019, background): “Interestingly, our results indicate that the motherhood effect on employment in Chile (-22%) is much lower than in countries like the US and the UK (around -40%; Kleven et al. 2019a; Kuziemko et al. 2018), and also smaller than the average effect found by Berniell et al.”
From Mancession to Shecession: Women’s Employment in Regular and Pandemic Recessions (2021, background): “In contrast, after having a child, the earnings of mothers stall, whereas fathers continue climbing the career ladder (e.g., Miller 2011; Adda, Dustmann, and Stevens 2017; Gallen 2018; Kleven, Landais, and Søgaard 2019; Kleven et al. 2019).”
Children and the Remaining Gender Gaps in the Labor Market (2020, unknown): “As discussed in Kleven et al. (2019a), the emphasis of the dynamic decomposition exercise is on 1There is an earlier literature that examines the effects of parenthood on wages using cross-sectional and fixed effects models.”
Baby steps: the gender division of childcare during the COVID-19 pandemic (2020, background): “The literature has long documented that the inherent incompatibilities between childcare commitments on the one hand, and job requirements on the other, carry a direct penalty on women’s earnings and careers as women reduce the hours of work to look after children (Hersch and Stratton, 2002; Sigle-R”
Gender in the Twenty-First Century (2020, methodology): “A summary of this evidence can be found in Kleven et al. (2019), which uses an event study methodology to estimate, in six countries, the impact of the birth of a first child on mothers’ and fathers’ labor market outcomes, which they define as gross labor earnings unconditional of employment status.”
The Impact of COVID-19 on Gender Equality (2020, background): “4See, for example, Kleven, Landais, and Søgaard (2019), Kleven et al. (2019), and Gallen (2018).”
This Time It's Different: The Role of Women's Employment in a Pandemic Recession (2020, background): “…labor markets of advanced economies is linked, in large part, to childbearing and the unequal division of childcare responsibilities between women and men (Miller 2011; Adda, Dustmann, and Stevens 2017; Kleven, Landais, and Søgaard 2019; Kleven et al. 2019; Gallen 2018; Hannusch 2019; Xiao 2020).”