Nuremberg Research Seminar in Economics on 19 June 2024, LG 0.423
You are invited to join the weekly Nuremberg Research Seminar in Economics on 19 June 2024, from 13.15 to 14.45 pm. The seminar will be held in room LG 0.423. Christian Zimpelmann (IZA – Institute of Labor Economics) will be talking about „How Gender Role Attitudes Shape Maternal Labor Supply”.
More information can be found here:
We examine the influence of gender role attitudes, specifically views about the appropriate role of mothers, on post-childbirth employment decisions. German panel data reveals that mothers with traditional attitudes are 15% less likely to work during early motherhood than their egalitarian counterparts. Differences also emerge at the intensive margin and are persistent for at least seven years. Fathers’ attitudes also predict maternal labor supply, highlighting joint decision-making within couples. Examining the interaction of attitudes with policies, we find that the introduction of a cash-for-care payment for parents who abstain from using public childcare substantially reduced the labor supply of traditional mothers, whereas egalitarian mothers’ labor supply remained unaffected. To examine counterfactual policy changes, we estimate a dynamic model of female labor supply that incorporates human capital accumulation and, as a novel feature, heterogeneity by gender attitudes. Labor supply elasticities are substantially larger for traditional mothers, while a policy facilitating full-time childcare access has a more pronounced effect on egalitarian mothers. Our findings stress that gender role attitudes moderate the impact of policies, which implies that measured average policy effects depend on the distribution of attitudes and, hence, cannot easily be transferred over time or to other countries.