Research

Work in progress

Parenting Leave Duration and Mothers’ Skills Along the Life Course (R&R in Demography)

with Sonja Spitzer and Claudia Reiter 

In the literature, a suggested explanation 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 is associated with lower numeracy scores by 3 to 5%. Results are not driven by fertility responses to the policies. Instead, longer entitlements relate to 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.

Pre-school Enrollment and Mothers’ Labour Supply : Evidence from Europe

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.

Mothers, Fathers and the Time Use Puzzle (Submitted)

This paper investigates how parenthood affects gender gaps in time allocation between productive and unproductive tasks, as well as time-use-related well-being. Using an event-study approach around the first birth, I track changes in time allocation and related satisfaction following entry into parenthood within couples in Germany. I show that women experience a sharp increase in productive time, partly offset by a decrease in leisure time but primarily by a reduction in time left for rest and self-care, thereby supporting the motherhood mental health penalty. During weekdays, fathers substitute housework with childcare rather than adjusting their paid working time, which shifts the burden of less enjoyable tasks to mothers. Finally, I find evidence of a mismatch between the large gender gap in unpaid work following childbirth and the absence of a gender gap in dissatisfaction with housework, pointing to the important role of gender 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 in the Journal of Population Economics)

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.