Archive Detail

Speaker:
Bernd Fitzenberger

This event is part of an event series „In_equality Colloquium“.

This paper presents an estimation strategy for the child penalty – the effect of first time motherhood. We further investigate how the 2007 reform in parental benefits in Germany changed the child penalty, how it affects the selection of women into motherhood and how much of the reform effects on labor market outcomes is explained by changes in the composition of mothers. A large novel data set linking data from the pension insurance with administrative labor market data provides information on all births. We apply a dynamic treatment effect approach which differs from other strategies used in the literature to estimate child penalties and to evaluate the 2007 reform. The reform has positive medium-run effects on earnings and employment. There are no effects on second-order fertility and on full-time employment. While the reform slightly changes the selection of mothers, this has little impact on the reform effect on the child penalty.

The paper is co-authored by Bernd Fitzenberger and Arnim Seidlitz

Bernd Fitzenberger is Director of the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) and Professor of Quantitative Labor Economics at Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg. In addition, he is a research fellow at the Institute of Labor Economics in Bonn, at CESifo in Munich and at the Research Center for Education and the Labor Market in Maastricht, as well as an international research affiliate at the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London. His main research areas are equality of income and salaries, employment trends, evaluation of measures in the field of labor market and education policy, vocational training and the transition from school to the labor market, employment of mothers, trade unions (binding collective agreements, degree of organisation, salary structures and employment), evaluation methods and methods of quantile regression.

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