Child penalties unpacked

We will collect survey data from a sample of ≈ 6, 000 Danish couples at the transition to parenthood. In the survey, we will elicit incentivized measures of (i) parental beliefs about their (future) potential earnings and how these would be affected by taking time off work, (ii) parental beliefs about the productivity of their individual time investments for child well-being, and (iii) parental preference weights for child well-being relative to their own careers.

We will collect two waves of these measures from both mothers and fathers—one during pregnancy around the 12-week pregnancy scan, and one after childbirth around the first birthday of the child.

These incentivized survey measures will be matched with the Danish register data allowing us to trace respondents’ labor hours, earnings, and parental leave-taking in the years after childbirth.

We will use a model of intra-household decision-making to formulate specific hypotheses on the extent to which child penalties vary with both partners’ beliefs and preferences in domains.

We will test these hypotheses by calculating intra-household child penalties based on event-study estimates, i.e., we will track the differential evolution of labor supply and earnings of mothers and fathers of the same child before and after childbirth. We then test to what extent these intra-household child penalties vary with our survey-based preference and belief parameters.

Furthermore, the theoretical model provides the foundation for an empirical decomposition of household-specific child penalties into channels (i)–(iii). This decomposition will allow us to gauge the relative importance of these preference and belief channels in accounting for child penalties.