Work in Progress
Child Penalty Estimation and Mothers' Age at First Birth
Abstract
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 method building on the recent
advances in the difference-in-differences literature to address this issue.
Applied to German administrative data, our method yields 30 percent larger
post-birth earnings losses than the conventional approach. We document
meaningful effect heterogeneity by maternal age in both magnitude and
interpretation, highlighting its key role in understanding the impact of
motherhood.
Wage Inequality Consequences of Expanding Public Childcare
Abstract
Family policies are important in shaping the labor supply of women. Hence, for
the female part of the population, they play a role as labor market
institutions. While the impact of such institutions as unions or minimum wages
on wage inequality has extensively been studied, family policies and their
effect on inequality have received much less attention. This paper, therefore,
assesses the impact of a large expansion of public childcare in Germany on wage
inequality. Exploiting regional variation in childcare supply, I show that in
regions with stronger increases in childcare wage inequality among women
increased less strongly compared to regions with smaller increases. This is
primarily driven by the lower half of the wage distribution and qualitatively
similar for both full- and part-time workers. Larger expansions in childcare,
however, do not contribute to a further closing of the gender wage gap,
suggesting they are associated with a more negative selection of women into the
workforce.
Unpacking Parental Leave: The Role of Job Protection
with Sebastian Findeisen*, Jörg Heining* and Sebastian Siegloch*
Abstract
Parental leave is one of the most important policies that shape the post-birth
careers of women. We exploit a sequence of parental leave reforms in Germany
that extended both the job protection period and the duration of parental leave
benefits to different extents to study the effects of the two policy instruments
parental leave consists of. Using administrative social security data, we first
replicate the stylized facts that mothers respond to extensions in parental
leave and that the average effect of longer leave-taking on their careers is
negative. In a second step, we analyze the causal effects of job protection and
parental benefit payments. Holding constant the length of mothers' post-birth
labor market break, we show that extending job protection significantly reduces
losses in long-run earnings while extensions of the benefit duration have no
measurable impact. The positive effect of employment protection works both by
enhancing employer continuity as well as by improving outside opportunities for
mothers who change their employer.
Published
Government Consumption in the DINA Framework: Allocation Methods and Consequences
with Holger Stichnoth*, International Tax and Public Finance, 2024, 31(3), 736–779.
Paper Journal WebsiteAbstract
About half of government expenditure in the United States takes the form of
government consumption (e.g., education, defense, infrastructure). In many
studies of post-tax inequality based on the DINA framework (including the
influential study by Piketty, Saez, and Zucman 2018), government consumption is
allocated either proportionally to post-tax disposable income or on a per-capita
basis, and the level of inequality is fairly sensitive to this choice. This
paper provides direct evidence on how public education spending (a substantial
part of government consumption) is actually distributed. An allocation
proportional to post-tax disposable income is clearly rejected, while a lump-sum
allocation is found to provide a good approximation.