Does European Country-Specific Context Alter Motherhood Penalty and Fatherhood Premium?

Anna Baranowska-Rataj, Umeå University
Anna Matysiak, Wittgenstein Centre (IIASA, VID/ÖAW, WU)

This paper contributes to the discussion on the effects of childbearing on men’s and women’s employment in the developed countries. While the literature on motherhood penalty due to childbearing is voluminous, there have been no empirical studies that systematically compare the size of the effect of fatherhood on employment cross-nationally net of selection into fatherhood. Furthermore, previous research for women has usually either compared the effects of childbearing across countries assuming exogeneity of family size to women’s employment or examined these effects by using methods which deal with endogeneity of family size and simultaneously focused on single countries. In this paper we overcome these shortcomings. We use instrumental variable models and examine the cross-country variation in the causal effects of family size on employment of men and women across the groups of European countries with diverging welfare state regime and gender norms.