Research
Publications
Parenthood and Academic Career Trajectories
with Ria Ivandic
Published in AEA Papers & Proceedings, 2024.
Click here for the pre-print version.
Media: LSE Centrepiece, LSE Impact Blog, Djoefbladet (in Danish), Khronos (in Norwegian).
Gender Gaps from Labor Market Shocks
with Ria Ivandic
Published in Labour Economics, 2023. Also avilable as a W.E. Upjohn Working Paper along with a non-technical summary.
Media: LSE Centrepiece, VoxEU.
Maternity Leave and Paternity Leave: Evidence on the Economic Impact of Legislative Changes in High Income Countries
with Serena Canaan, Herdis Steingrimsdottir and Philip Rosenbaum
Published in Oxford Research Encyclopedias, 2022. Also available as IZA DP No. 15129.
Working Papers
Gender Norms and Specialization in Household Production: Evidence from a Danish Parental Leave Reform
Parental leave is viewed as crucial to alleviating the gender inequalities that arise upon parenthood, but policies are often ineffective. This paper examines the impact of expanding parental leave in Denmark. The results show that mothers increase their
leave by 5 weeks, while the average leave duration of fathers remains unchanged. In turn, the earnings gap within couples increases. Leave duration is unaffected by relative earnings, and is instead highly consistent with the role of gender norms.
I document both inter-generational spillovers from maternal labor supply and peer effects among sisters who take a longer leave if exposed to the reform-induced change in leave duration.
Click here for the working paper
Firms and the Gender Wage Gap: A Comparison of Eleven Countries
with Marco G. Palladino, Antoine Bertheau, Alexander Hijzen, Astrid Kunze, Cesar Barreto, Dogan Gülümser, Marta Lachowska, Salvatore Lattanzio, Benjamin Lochner, Stefano Lombardi, Jordy Meekes, Balazs Murakozy, and Oskar Skans.
We quantify the role of gender-specific firm wage premiums in explaining the private-sector gender gap in hourly wages using a harmonized research design across 11 matched employeremployee datasets — ten European countries and Washington State, USA. These premiums contribute to the gender wage gap through two channels: women’s concentration in lowerpaying firms (sorting) and women receiving lower premiums than men within the same firm (pay-setting). We find that firm wage premiums account for 10 to 30 percent of the gender wage gap. While both mechanisms matter, sorting is the predominant driver of the firm contribution to the gender wage gap in most countries. We document three patterns that are broadly consistent across countries: (1) women’s sorting into lower-paying firms increases with age; (2) women are more concentrated in low-paying firms with a high share of part-time workers; and (3) women receive about 90 percent of the rents that men receive from firm surplus gains.
Click here the working paper, the NBER SI talk, and the the related OECD report.
Research in Progress
Parenthood and the Career Ladder: Evidence from Academia (E-mail me for draft)
with Ria Ivandic, Sofie Cairo and Valentina Tartari
Expanding Paternity Leave: Effects on Beliefs, Norms, and Gender Gaps?
with Henrik Kleven, Camille Landais, Philip Rosenbaum, Herdis Steingrimsdottir, and Jakob Søgaard