The prolonged career break around childbirth is one of the reasons behind large motherhood penalties in terms of pay and employment opportunities. We aim to understand what is driving the duration of career break in Italy, where it often remains longer than the five-month obligatory maternity...

We examine whether financial incentives affect fertility and family planning. We use a reform reducing child benefits paid to larger families together with Danish longitudinal register data on the universe of legal abortions and birth control pill purchases to address this question. We find that...

Education levels in Burkina Faso, especially among women, remain low despite efforts made by government authorities and development partners to implement priority area 4 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This situation presents difficulties for women in terms of their being...

The transition to parenthood is a critical period that exacerbates gendered economic inequality, with mothers more likely than their partners to experience employment disruptions and income losses. This study examines individual poverty risk among partnered indivduals (N=1,237) in Germany from a...

Accurate demographic data are essential for effective policy design, yet private costs may deter individuals from truthfully reporting sensitive information. We examine this market failure and its implications in the context of child motherhood. Using administrative records from Brazil, Mexico,...

We present evidence that shared institutional and economic contexts may be at least as important as culturally rooted gender equality norms for the size of the motherhood penalty. Our study covers child migrants and children of immigrants in Sweden, and while the results point to a moderate but...

This study investigates the influence of the male breadwinner norm on fathers' decisions regarding childcare responsibilities. We study the complex interplay between economic factors and gender norms in shaping the division of household labor within families by analyzing the impact a...

This paper examines the relationship between the timing of childbirth and the motherhood penalty among high-skilled Danish women. Earlier studies typically find that delaying first childbirth increases female earnings. However, postponing the first birth may also have negative fertility...

This brief provides insight into how Ethiopia increased the duration of paid maternity leave from 90 to 120 days and introduced three days of paid paternity leave in 2019. While ensuring job-protected leave of adequate length and pay for both parents is critical for a variety of health,...

The gender wage gap rises with experience. To what extent do firm policies mediate this rise? We use administrative data from Italy to identify workers' first jobs and compute wage growth over the next 5 years. We then decompose the contribution of first employers to the rise in the gender wage...

The relationship between parenthood and gendered labor market outcomes has been extensively studied, with the 'child penalty'-defined as the effect of having children on mothers' labor earnings relative to their partners'-documented in many countries. While prior research has explored...

Russia's Maternity Capital program, launched in 2007, is a key policy with an obvious pronatalist focus aimed at countering the country's long-term depopulation trend by encouraging families to have more children. Initially, providing financial incentives for second and subsequent births. The...

This field experiment investigates the causal impact of mothers’ perceptions of gender norms on their employment attitudes and labor-supply expectations. We provide mothers of young children in Germany with information about the prevailing gender norm regarding maternal employment in their...

Female workers in China have a de jure right to maternity benefits, as enshrined in policy and legal documents since the 1950s. This article examines why this entitlement is not always de facto guaranteed as stipulated in the legislation. We use the conceptual framework of gradual institutional...

I use the universe of tax returns in Germany and a regression kink design to estimate the impacts of mothers' parental leave benefit amounts on couple earnings inequality. I make use of a benefits cap to estimate the causal impacts for high-earning women; a group for which earnings inequality is...

This study evaluates the impact of an Italian government initiative launched in 2007, which allocated €1 billion to regional governments to enhance early childhood care services for children aged 0-2, targeting both public and private childcare options. Exploiting variations in the timing of...

The gender pension gap, the difference in pension entitlements between men and women, is 32 percent for 60-yearolds according to data from the German Pension Insurance (Deutsche Rentenversicherung). In addition, there is a considerable motherhood pension gap: Statutory pension entitlements for...

The gender wage gap rises with experience. To what extent do firm policies mediate this rise? We use administrative data from Italy to identify workers' first jobs and compute wage growth over the next 5 years. We then decompose the contribution of first employers to the rise in the gender wage...

The relationship between parenthood and gendered labor market outcomes has been extensively studied, with the 'child penalty'-defined as the effect of having children on mothers' labor earnings relative to their partners'-documented in many countries. While prior research has explored...

This paper measures the impact of a micronutrient training among women farmers with young children on the demand for zinc-enhanced varieties. We conducted a randomized control trial by providing micronutrient training in randomly selected villages in May-June 2017. These farmers were also given...

We show that the widespread approach to estimate the career costs of motherhood – so called “child penalties” – is prone to produce biased results, as it pools first-time mothers of all ages without accounting for their differences in characteristics and outcomes. We propose a novel...

Maternity unit closures are increasingly common in areas with low birth rates, resulting in diminished competition between units. We examine how competition affects the quality and amenities of the remaining maternity units in Germany. To address potential endogeneity in the level of...

By conducting a problematizing review, this study explores whether entrepreneurship could benefit mothers caring for children with additional needs (ANs). Through role conflict theory, we argue that entrepreneurship provides the time and space flexibility necessary to combine work and care roles...

Models of female labor supply routinely assume that women have accurate expectations about post-birth employment, but little is known about whether this assumption holds. We use a 2019 state-contingent survey of 11,000 Danish women linked to administrative data to compare pre-birth beliefs to...

We study the impacts of childbirth on maternal mental health, the role of pro-natalist cash transfers, and the fertility consequences of maternal mental health. Using claims-level data from South Korea's universal healthcare system, we find that mental health diagnoses rise by 34.8% (198.7%)...

This letter contributes to the literature on gender disparities in professional life by exploring how men and women perceive the impact of parenthood on career outcomes. It does so through the lens of perceived employer-given opportunities ("chances") and perceived own career-related behaviour...

This paper examines the impact of two major family policies on maternal health, using rich claims data from the German Pharmacoepidemiological Research Database (GePaRD). We report a significant short-term impact of childcare on diagnosed respiratory diseases and heterogeneous effects on mental...

This paper investigates the causal impact of childbirth on women's likelihood of informal employment in Russia using twenty years of RLMS. We apply an event study framework following Kleven et al. (2019) to quantify child penalties in labour market outcomes and whether women are more likely to...

We leverage pronounced changes in the availability of public schooling for young children - through duration expansions to the kindergarten day - to better understand how an implicit childcare subsidy affects mothers and families. Exploiting full-day kindergarten variation across place and time...

Protecting children's rights and interests, especially within families, is crucial globally. Effective laws and enforcement are needed to ensure their safety and prevent violence, both offline and online. Kazakhstan's efforts in this regard, including legal protection for motherhood and...

This field experiment investigates the causal impact of mothers' perceptions of gender norms on their employment attitudes and labor-supply expectations. We provide mothers of young children in Germany with information about the prevailing gender norm regarding maternal employment in their city....