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 28 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.
Selected media coverage: Reuters*, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung*, Die Rheinpfalz*, Tagesschau*
Wage Inequality Consequences of Expanding Public Childcare
Abstract
Family policies are often analyzed at the micro-level with respect to their
short-run effects, even though, for female workers, they play a role as labor
market institutions. Therefore, this paper assesses the impact of a large
expansion of public childcare in Germany on wage inequality. Exploiting regional
variation in childcare supply over the 1990s, I show that in regions with
stronger increases in childcare, wage inequality among women increased less
strongly compared to regions with fewer added childcare slots. This is driven by
changes in workforce composition playing a larger role, it is more pronounced in
the lower half of the wage distribution and qualitatively similar for full- and
part-time workers. Larger expansions in childcare, however, do not contribute to
a further closing of the gender wage gap.
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.