Why Do Women Wait? Matching, Wage Inequality, and the Incentives for Fertility Delay

Caucutt, Elizabeth M.; Guner, Nezih; Knowles, John A.

doi:10.1006/redy.2002.0190

Cited by 151 publications

(121 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…8 Turning to the converse relationship, previous work has associated fertility timing with male and female wages in time-series (Butz and Ward, 1979) and cross-sectional data (Heckman and Walker, 1990). Happel et al (1984) finds that women in higher-paying occupations choose longer intervals from first marriage to motherhood, and Caucutt et al (2002) associates higher female earnings with delayed motherhood. These correlations are similar to the ones noted in Hofferth (1984), only viewed from a different perspective.…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Fertility delay has been increasing concurrently with female education, labor force participation, and earnings in Europe since 1960 (Gustafsson, 2001), and in the United States since the post-war baby boom (Chen and Morgan, 1991;Caucutt et al, 2002). Hofferth (1984) noted the cross-sectional correlation almost two decades ago in data from the 1976 Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The effects of motherhood timing on career path

2009

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This paper estimates the effects of motherhood timing on female career path, using national panel data from the NLSY79, and biological fertility shocks as instrumental variables for the age at which a woman bears her first child. Motherhood delay leads to a substantial increase in career earnings, a smaller increase in wage rates, and an increase in career hours worked. The postponement wage premium is largest for college-educated women, and those in professional, managerial, and clerical occupations.Family leave laws do not significantly influence the premium. Conversely, using measured aptitude level as an instrumental variable for expected future earnings, we show that higher expected career earnings lead women to postpone childbearing.1

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Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The effects of motherhood timing on career path

2009

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“…The reason is that while our model was calibrated to an aggregate fertility rate of 2.1, the data in the first column implies an average of 1.8 children per woman. 12 Therefore, we could not ask the model to reproduce the fertility rate together with the distribution of children in the first column. However, this comparison shows that the model generates a reasonable distribution of number of children across females.…”

Section: Fertility and Labor Turnover By Educationmentioning

confidence: 99%

A general equilibrium analysis of parental leave policies

Erosa

Fuster

Restuccia

2010

Review of Economic Dynamics

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An important feature of the U.S. labor market is that, even after controlling for measurable differences in education and experience, the average wage of women with children is 89 percent of the average wage of women without children. This "family gap" in wages accounts for almost half the gender gap in wages. Proponents of mandatory-leave policies argue that career interruptions associated with fertility have long-lasting effects on female employment and are costly in terms of human-capital losses for females. Despite the fact that mandatory leaves are widely applied in developed countries, their effects on the economy are not well understood. We develop and calibrate a general-equilibrium model of fertility and labor-market decisions to study the quantitative impact of such policies. We build on the Mortensen and Pissarides (1994) labor-market framework by introducing male and female workers, general and specific human-capital accumulation on the job, and temporary separations between the worker and a job. We find that: (i) the loss of specific human capital accounts for a small fraction of the wage gaps and (ii) mandatory-leave policies have substantial aggregate and redistributive effects on fertility, employment, and welfare. Interestingly, we find that the general-equilibrium effect of mandatory-leave policies is a reduction in the amount of time females spend at home with children.Keywords: Parental leaves, fertility, specific human capital, temporary separations. JEL Classification: J2,J3. † We are grateful to Ig Horstmann for comments and suggestions. We also thank seminar participants at several universities and conferences. All remaining errors are our own. We acknowledge the financial support of the BBVA foundation.

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“…The duration of the first stage of life is selected so that the fraction of individuals who do not marry, that is transit to the second stage of life, by age 27, corresponds to the estimate for the cohort born in the period 1948-1957 reported in Table IV of Caucutt et al (2002). Life is assumed to begin at age 18 and we assume the average durations for the three stages are 6, 39, and 9 years.…”

Section: Calibrationmentioning

confidence: 99%