Children and Career Interruptions: The Family Gap in Denmark (original) (raw)
Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue Canadienne d`Economique, 2001
Why do Canadian mothers have lower incomes than women who have never had children? Microdata from the 1995 GSS allow examination of two hypotheses:~1! mothers have spent more time out of the labour force, thus acquiring less human capital;~2! higher levels of unpaid work lead to fatigue and0or scheduling difficulties. Measuring work history does little to account for the 'family gap.' The estimated child penalty is reduced by allowing for 'human capital depreciation' and controlling for unpaid work hours, but the two hypotheses together cannot entirely explain the gap. JEL Classification: J0, J3
Compatibility of children and work preferences: two European cases
2005
Nowadays female participation in the labor market and motherhood are competing and the conciliation between them can be solved in different ways. In this paper we analyze children and work preferences in two European countries with very different behaviour: Italy and France. Italy shares with Spain the lowest fertility level (the TFR is around 1.25) whereas French TFR reaches the highest level (1.89) among the European Community countries. Moreover female employment rate in Italy is about 40% whereas in France reaches 70%. In these two contexts, using data from the European Community Household Panel, we model jointly fertility and female participation in the labor market, taking into account the potential correlation across unobserved heterogeneity in children and work preferences.
The ability of markets to accommodate women's labor force transitions in connection to childbirth and to ease the trade-offs between work and childcare varies significantly within Europe. I use the 1994-2000 waves of the European Community Household panel to estimate both a logit and a multinomial logit model of the transitions in/out of the labor force, as well as into unemployment of women after births of different order across 13 countries. Models are estimated at 12 and 36 months after birth. At the individual level, I control for women's and spouse's personal (education) and employment characteristics (type/length of contract, sector). At the country level, institutional and economic differences across countries and regions (maternity benefits, size of government sector, typology of contracts, unemployment) are used. Results shed light on what factors contribute to balance childbearing with labor market activity.
Childbearing and the Labor Market: Time and Space Dynamics
Fertility is an important determinant of long-run population growth and labor market conditions. The present study focuses on the effects of time and space dynamics on the description of fertility in Sweden. The influence of time dynamics in postponing or accelerating childbearing was assessed by considering two different effects of earnings. Firstly, the effect within one generation was considered by comparing a family's current earnings with their earnings in the recent past and expected earnings in the future. The second effect, referred to previously as the Easterlin hypothesis, was examined through the generations by comparing a household's earnings for a younger generation with earnings of the parental generation. These effects were expected to be generated by labor mobility across municipalities. The empirical evidence for the period 1985-2008 involved estimating space and time dynamics by using a spatial first-order and serial secondorder panel data model. By comparing different specifications, the hypothesis about positive spatial autocorrelation of fertility was supported. Current earnings appeared to have a negative effect on fertility rates within municipalities, and in the long-run, across them. The study makes an important theoretical contribution through the application of stationarity conditions and evaluation of the long-run effects in the direct, indirect and total forms of the model.
Families, Labor Markets, and Policy
SSRN Electronic Journal
Using comparable data for 24 countries since the 1970s, we document gender convergence in schooling, employment and earnings, marriage delay and the accompanying decline in fertility, and the large remaining gaps in labor market outcomes, especially among parents. A model of time allocation illustrates how the specialization of spouses in home or market production responds to preferences, comparative advantages and public policies. We draw lessons from existing evidence on the impacts of family policies on women's careers and children's wellbeing. There is to date little or no evidence of beneficial effects of longer parental leave (or fathers' quotas) on maternal participation and earnings. In most cases longer leave delays mothers' return to work, without long-lasting consequences on their careers. More generous childcare funding instead encourages female participation whenever subsidized childcare replaces maternal childcare. Impacts on child development depend on counterfactual childcare arrangements and tend to be more beneficial for disadvantaged households. In-work benefits targeted to low-earners have clear positive impacts on lone mothers' employment and negligible impacts on other groups. While most of this literature takes policy as exogenous, political economy aspects of policy adoption help understand the interplay between societal changes, family policies and gender equality.
In this paper we aim to study and compare the countries of the former EU-15 in terms of the difference in labour market conditions between mothers and non-mothers and we look at how public policies can be designed in order to minimise the employment penalties associated with the presence of young children and thus promote parenthood by working women. As women choose to take part in paid employment, fertility rates will depend on their possibilities to combine employment and motherhood. As a result, the motherhood-induced employment penalties discussed in this paper as well as the role of public policies should be given priority attention by politicians and policy-makers. Firstly, in this paper we start out from a multinomial logit model to analyse motherhood-induced employment gaps in the EU-15. Then, various decomposition techniques (the method of recycled prediction and the and technique adapted to the non-linear case) are applied to the computed gross FTE employment gaps between mothers and non-mothers to isolate the net employment effect associated with the presence of children from that of differences in characteristics between mothers and non-mothers. Special attention is also given to the specific role of education to contain the negative labour market consequences that derive from the presence of young children. It seems that differences in characteristics such as age, education and non labour personal income do not influence a lot the difference in employment status. Secondly, we use an OLS regression to confront motherhood-induced employment penalties with selfconstructed country-specific indicators of child policies, used as explanatory variables, in order to test the impact and effectiveness of policies of different design and generosity on these employment gaps that separate mothers of young children from non-mothers and mothers with grown up children. We round off our analysis by presenting a new typology and country-specific overview of the adjustment mechanisms applied by career-pursuing mothers on the labour market as well as of the supportiveness of different child policies. In the conclusion, we carefully review the main results of this research, advance a number of policy recommendations and suggest interesting avenues for future research.
Time is Money – The Influence of Parenthood Timing on Wages
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research at DIW Berlin This series presents research findings based either directly on data from the German SocioEconomic Panel Study (SOEP) or using SOEP data as part of an internationally comparable data set (e.g. CNEF, ECHP, LIS, LWS, CHER/PACO). SOEP is a truly multidisciplinary household panel study covering a wide range of social and behavioral sciences:
Mothers’ and children’s employment in Europe. A comparative analysis
2019
This paper presents a comparative analysis using EU-SILC data of the correlation between mothers’ employment during adolescence and their children’s probability of being workless (i.e. either unemployed or inactive) at about 30 years of age in 19 European countries. By estimating various multilevel logit models, the paper shows that, on average, having had a working mother is associated with a reduction in the probability of being workless of about 25 to 35 percent for daughters and 20 to 25 percent for sons. Cross-country differences in these correlations are much larger for daughters than for sons, in particular for daughters with children, and do not reflect the usual country groupings. Our results suggest that mothers’ employment not only influences preferences for labor market participation, but also some attitudes or skills that favor their children’s successful integration into the labor market. Moreover, the observed correlation between mothers’ employment and thei...
Acta Sociologica, 2005
The proportion of women who withdraw from paid employment when they get children differs considerably among countries of the European union. This variation in child effects has mostly been attributed to institutional factors. In this study, we reassess the institutional explanation because earlier supportive evidence is threatened by two alternative macro-level explanations: The influence of the economic necessity to work and the influence of gender role values in society. Our main research question is whether and to what extent these alternative explanations alter the effect of public childcare arrangements on mother's labour supply. Using panel data from 13 countries of the European Union, we find evidence in favour of the institutional and economic explanations. In countries with more generous provision of public childcare and in countries with a lower level of economic welfare, the impact of childbirth on female labour supply is less negative than in other countries. Economic welfare appears to suppress rather than rival the institutional effect. More egalitarian gender role values in a country increase mother's labour supply, yet these values do not alter the institutional effect. Our results underpin the importance of publicly supported arrangements for enhancing female labour supply.