The Career Costs of Children

By J. Adda, Christian Dustmann, Katrien Stevens. Journal of Political Economy, 2017

485 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We estimate a dynamic life cycle model of labor supply, fertility, and savings, incorporating occupational choices, with specific wage paths and skill atrophy that vary over the career. This allows us to understand the trade-off between occupational choice and desired fertility, as well as sorting both into the labor market and across occupations. We quantify the life cycle career costs associated with children, how they decompose into loss of skills during interruptions, lost earnings opportunities, and selection into more child-friendly occupations. We analyze the long-run effects of policies that encourage fertility and show that they are considerably smaller than short-run effects.

Subfields: Accounting, Demography, Gender Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/de9f16cdbd414944f24e91ced58f887eb41f649f

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Citations in the corpus

Fearless Woman: Financial Literacy and Stock Market Participation (2021, unknown): “2017); fertility choices; and selection into family-friendly career paths (Adda et al. 2017).”
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).”
Firms, Informality, and Development: Theory and Evidence from Brazil (2018, methodology): “3 Identification To further investigate whether the chosen moments allow me to identify all the parameters, I follow the analysis in Adda et al. (2017). The basic motivation is that if the model is well-identified, the objective function should not be flat in the region around the vector of estimate”
Gender Inequality and Economic Development: Fertility, Education and Norms (2017, unknown): “…(1998), Lundberg and Rose (2000), Correll et al. (2007), Sigle-Rushton and Waldfogel (2007a,b), Paull (2008), Bertrand et al. (2010), Wilde et al. (2010), Fernandez-Kranz et al. (2013), Fitzenberger et al. (2013), Goldin (2014), Adda et al. (2015), Angelov et al. (2016) and Kleven et al. (2016).”
Children and the Remaining Gender Gaps in the Labor Market (2020, unknown): “Several recent studies have also shown that women make certain career choices in anticipation of children.21 Adda et al. (2017) estimate a dynamic life cycle model of labor supply, fertility, and occupational choice to study the trade-off between occupational choices and intended fertility.”
Gender Gaps in Performance: Evidence from Young Lawyers (2017, unknown): “See, for instance, Altonji and Blank (1999), Blau et al. (1988), Goldin (1990), Blau and Kahn (2000), Bertrand et al. (2010) and Adda et al. (2015).”
The Mommy Effect: Do Women Anticipate the Employment Effects of Motherhood? (2018, unknown): “Most of these models (e.g., Attanasio et al., 2008; Blundell et al., 2016; Adda et al., 2017) assume that agents have perfect foresight of how children will affect labor supply and thus plan accordingly.13 This section provides several pieces of evidence that questions that assumption and suggests…”
Families in Macroeconomics (2016, unknown): “Recently, Adda et al. (2016) have provided a detailed study of the costs of children in terms of mother’s careers based on a detailed life cycle model of female employment and fertility matched to German data.”