A wage penalty is regularly observed for working mothers. Reasons for this gap include reduced human capital, unobserved heterogeneity, and dissipation of energy leading to lower work effort and productivity. In this paper we use the NLSYW to revisit the motherhood wage penalty. Like other...

This paper seeks an explanation for the well-documented wage disadvantage of mothers compared to women without children. An analysis of data from the 1968-88 National Longitudinal Survey of Young Women shows that human capital inputs and unobserved heterogeneity explain 55-57% of the gap....