This study identifies a new mechanism to account for the persistent gender differences in earnings after childbirth. Aside from women's voluntary wage cuts in pursuit of family-friendly job amenities, we claim that adverse labor market conditions at the time of childbearing widen the gender gap...

The occurrence of twin births has been widely used as a natural experiment. With a focus upon the use of twin births for identification of causal effects in economics, this chapter provides a critical review of methods and results.

The existence of large child penalties has been documented for multiple countries and time periods. In this paper, we assess to what extent marriage decisions and pregnancies (rather than live births), which tend to occur around the birth of the first child, explain part of the so-called...

We study how childbirth increases the likelihood of young, working mothers to claim disability insurance and how paternity leave could ease this effect. Our event study analysis uses Belgian data to show that the incidence rate of disability across gender only diverges after first-time...

Motherhood continues to pose significant challenges to women's careers, and a correct assessment of its effects is crucial for understanding the persistent gender inequality in the labor market. We show that the prevalent approach to estimate post-birth earnings losses - so called "child...