An empirical assessment of the effects of parenthood on wages

Abstract

In this chapter, we characterise the selection into parenthood for men and women separately and estimate the effects of motherhood and fatherhood on wages. We apply propensity score matching exploiting an extensive high-quality register-based data set augmented with family background information. We estimate the net effects of parenthood and find that mothers receive 7.4% lower average wages compared to non-mothers, whereas fathers gain 6.0% in terms of average wages from fatherhood.

Citation

Simonsen, M. and Skipper, L. (2008), "An empirical assessment of the effects of parenthood on wages", Fomby, T., Carter Hill, R., Millimet, D.L., Smith, J.A. and Vytlacil, E.J. (Ed.) Modelling and Evaluating Treatment Effects in Econometrics (Advances in Econometrics, Vol. 21), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 359-380. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0731-9053(07)00012-6