We show that the widespread approach to estimate the career costs of motherhood – so called “child penalties” – is prone to produce biased results, as it pools first-time mothers of all ages without accounting for their differences in characteristics and outcomes. We propose a novel...

We analyze the contribution of credit spread, house and stock price shocks to GDP growth in the US based on a Bayesian VAR with time-varying parameters estimated over 1958-2012. Our main findings are: (i) The contribution of financial shocks to GDP growth fluctuates from about 20 percent in...