School Schedule and the Gender Pay Gap

Abstract

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The Summer Drop in Female Employment

“…Expansions in the availability of schooling generally have positive effects on mothers' labor supply (Gelbach, 2002;Cascio, 2009;Fitzpatrick, 2012). With regard to the timing of schooling, Duchini and Van Effenterre (2022) find gains in the continuity of maternal employment when…”

Motherhood and the Cost of Job Search

“…Another strand of the literature has analyzed the impact of the supply of external childcare on mothers' allocation of work time. Duchini and Effenterre (2023) and Price and Wasserman (2023) highlight the influence of the public school schedule while Cortés and Pan (2019) highlight the influence of the availability of cheap private childcare services. Our results confirm that school schedule affect mothers' allocation of time, but for job search activities.…”

“…For a comprehensive description of this reform, see Duchini and Effenterre (2023). Overall, the effect of the reform was twofold: first, it increased the free public childcare provision at school; second, it spread it more evenly across weekdays.…”

“…About 20% of French municipalities adopted the new schedule in 2013; the rest only did so in 2014. Though this reform was motivated by pedagogical considerations, it was shown to boost mothers' propensity to work on Wednesdays and have a full-time contract (Duchini and Effenterre, 2023).…”

“…Though it was not its primary objective, the reform was found to boost mothers' propensity to work on Wednesdays and have a full-time contract (Duchini and Effenterre, 2023). We estimate the effect of the reform on unemployed parents' job search, in a differences-indifferences model where unemployed workers with no children serve as a control group.…”