Research

Work in progress

Parenting Leave Duration and Mothers’ Skills Along the Life Course, with Sonja Spitzer and Claudia Reiter (Under Review)

A suggested explanation in the literature for the motherhood wage penalty is human capital loss during career interruptions around childbirth. This study provides first empirical evidence on this potential mechanism by examining whether longer parenting leave relates to lower mothers’ work-relevant skills. Using a newly constructed policy dataset covering 40 years of maternity and parental leave reforms across 19 European countries, we link variation in statutory leave duration to later-life numeracy skills. We find that each additional year of statutory parenting leave reduces mothers’ numeracy scores by 3% to 5%. This decline is not driven by fertility responses to the policies. Instead, longer entitlements lengthen career breaks in the short run and lower employment in the long run. This suggests extended leave may decrease mothers’ labor market attachment and thus reduce opportunities to use and maintain work-relevant skills along the life course, consistent with the “use it or lose it” hypothesis. Results are driven by countries with long leave, pointing to nonlinearities in the relationship. 

Pre-school Enrollment and Mothers’ Labour Supply, with Julien Bergeot

Given that child-related career interruptions are mostly borne by women, childcare provision appears as one of the cornerstones of gender equality on the labour market. In this context, this paper evaluates the effect of pre-school availability on maternal labour supply in a European comparison perspective. We use data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) and exploit the discontinuous relationship between eligibility to pre-school and the child’s year of birth to predict enrollment in a fuzzy regression on discontinuity design. We show that pre-school enrollment does not increase maternal labour supply on average. Nevertheless, further explorations show that the intensive margin is positively affected for the most educated mothers and mothers who do not have younger children. At the country level, pre-school is a leverage for maternal labour market participation in countries with stronger gender stereotypes and in countries with a low investment in early childcare.

Parenthood, Gender Norms and Time Use Within Couples (Submitted)

This paper investigates how parenthood affects gender gaps in time allocation between working time (paid and unpaid) and non-working time (leisure and residual time). Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, I apply an event-study approach to track changes in time allocation around the first birth with a couple-level perspective. I show that women experience a sharp increase in total working time, primarily offset by a reduction in residual time - that is, time for rest and self-care. Men's total working time increases to a smaller extent and is entirely explained by childcare. Their time spent on housework tasks decreases due to childbirth, shifting additional housework load to mothers. These disparities intensify with family size. Further analyses show that gender norms shape time use responses to transition into parenthood. First, gender gaps in the time use penalty are more pronounced in West Germany, where the male breadwinner model remains prevalent. Second, women who are more educated than their partner "do gender" by increasing their unpaid workload to a higher extent than mothers in other couple settings, despite going back to paid work more intensively. Third, I observe a mismatch between the large gender gap in unpaid work following childbirth and the absence of a gap in dissatisfaction with housework, underscoring the role of gender identity norms in shaping well-being perceptions.

Gender Norms and Cognitive Health in Later Life: An Analysis of Second-Generation Immigrants, with Eric Bonsang (Under Review)

This paper investigates the relationship between gender norms and the cognitive gender gap among older individuals. We use data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) and the Integrated Values Surveys (IVS) to examine how gender differences in cognitive functioning among second-generation immigrants are related to gender norms in their parents’ country of birth. This approach allows to identify the effect of social norms while holding the institutional background fixed. Our results indicate that more conservative gender norms in the parents’ country of birth are associated with lower cognitive test scores for women compared to men. Further explorations suggest that gender differences in the type of occupation partly explain this relationship. This study highlights that policies aiming at promoting gender equality might have important implications for the cognitive health of older women.