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

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 for the working paper, the NBER SI talk, and the the related OECD report.

Expanding Paternity Leave: Effects on Beliefs, Norms, and Gender Gaps?

with Henrik Kleven, Camille Landais, Philip Rosenbaum, Herdis Steingrimsdottir, and Jakob Søgaard

We study whether policy can shift gendered beliefs, norms, and labor market outcomes by exploiting a major expansion of earmarked paternity leave in Denmark. The reform generated large first-stage effects, substantially reallocating leave from mothers to fathers. Using a regression discontinuity design combined with new survey data linked to administrative records, we show that the reform makes parents more supportive of paternity leave, shifts gender-role beliefs in a progressive direction, and reduces perceived differences in childcare ability. The reform also narrows gender gaps in earnings and hours worked. The earnings gap falls by 33pp in the first year following childbirth (during leave) and by 2.8pp in the second year (after leave). These results demonstrate that policy can meaningfully influence beliefs, norms, and gender inequality. On the other hand, earmarking restricts families’ ability to allocate leave freely and lowers leave satisfaction, highlighting a central trade-off inherent in paternalistic policies
Click here for the NBER working paper.

Parenthood and the Career Ladder: Evidence from Academia

with Ria Ivandic, Sofie Cairo and Valentina Tartari
Persistent gender gaps in the labor market are largely driven by the under-representation of women at the top of most professions. We study how parenthood shapes gender gaps in academic careers using population-wide administrative and survey data linked to productivity and promotion records. Parenthood marks a sharp divergence in academic careers: one in three women exit academia following motherhood. Men also experience a decline in academic employment after fatherhood, but the effects are substantially smaller. For mothers, childbirth leads to a persistent decline in both tenure attainment and research output, while men’s trajectories on these margins are unaffected by parenthood. The child penalty on tenure is driven primarily by women’s higher exit rates from academia. Gender differences in career aspirations do not explain these findings; instead, childcare and mobility constraints play a central role. Child penalties are exacerbated in highly competitive environments and environments without senior female role models.
Click here for the working paper.

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

Research in Progress

The Socio-Economic Gradient in Reporting of Domestic Violence

with Sonia Bhalotra, Ria Ivandic, and Timo Hener

Educational Disparities and The Role of Societal Reward Functions

with Kai Barron and Herdis Steingrimsdottir (pilot in process)