Periodic Reporting for period 2 - ORIGENDER (The Origen of Gender Inequality: Nurture vs. Nature and Quantifying Gender Preference)
Período documentado: 2020-08-01 hasta 2021-07-31
Women today still earn significantly less than men. Even in the Scandinavian countries, who long have been considered forerunners in gender equality, the gender pay gap has fallen only marginally over the past two-three decades. The persistence of the remaining gender pay gap has received wide attention from both policy makers and academia, and a number of countries and institutions have the direct aim of fostering gender equality. This includes the European Union, where gender equality is included as a stated objective in Horizon 2020, and countries increasingly adopt policies that directly “force” greater gender equality, a salient example being the recent adoption of earmarked parental leave at the EU level.
One explanation for gender inequality in the labor market focus on the role of human capital and discrimination, but the reduction of gender differences in education and the implementation of anti-discrimination policies suggest that the explanation for the remaining gender gap lies elsewhere. Hence, scholars increasingly highlight the importance of gender identity and norms in shaping labor market outcomes.
In ORIGENDER, I advance our understanding of the role of gender norms in shaping the gender pay gap by answering two key questions: First, given the importance that gender roles play, it is natural to ask why gender roles on the labor market still are so traditional – in particular in families with children? Second, can we directly quantify how much individuals value traditional gender roles? The answers to these questions constitute a significant leap compared to our current understanding and will eventually help us design better policies to foster gender equality.
ORIGENDER has advanced our understand in two ways:
First, by comparing the labor market trajectories of men and women in biological and adoptive families using event studies around the arrival of children and almost forty years of administrative adoption data from Denmark we find that short-run child penalties are slightly larger for biological mothers than for adoptive mothers, but their long-run child penalties are virtually identical and precisely estimated. This suggests that biology is not a key driver of child-related gender gaps. Instead this result add to the cumulative evidence on the importance of norms and social behavior.
Second, using Danish register data on almost 200,000 births combined with sharp variation
in economic incentives created by the parental leave benefit system we study how the design of parental leave benefits affect the division of leave among parents. A key insight from this work is that the replacement rate plays an important role in ensuring that fathers take up leave earmarked to them.
One explanation for gender inequality in the labor market focus on the role of human capital and discrimination, but the reduction of gender differences in education and the implementation of anti-discrimination policies suggest that the explanation for the remaining gender gap lies elsewhere. Hence, scholars increasingly highlight the importance of gender identity and norms in shaping labor market outcomes.
In ORIGENDER, I advance our understanding of the role of gender norms in shaping the gender pay gap by answering two key questions: First, given the importance that gender roles play, it is natural to ask why gender roles on the labor market still are so traditional – in particular in families with children? Second, can we directly quantify how much individuals value traditional gender roles? The answers to these questions constitute a significant leap compared to our current understanding and will eventually help us design better policies to foster gender equality.
ORIGENDER has advanced our understand in two ways:
First, by comparing the labor market trajectories of men and women in biological and adoptive families using event studies around the arrival of children and almost forty years of administrative adoption data from Denmark we find that short-run child penalties are slightly larger for biological mothers than for adoptive mothers, but their long-run child penalties are virtually identical and precisely estimated. This suggests that biology is not a key driver of child-related gender gaps. Instead this result add to the cumulative evidence on the importance of norms and social behavior.
Second, using Danish register data on almost 200,000 births combined with sharp variation
in economic incentives created by the parental leave benefit system we study how the design of parental leave benefits affect the division of leave among parents. A key insight from this work is that the replacement rate plays an important role in ensuring that fathers take up leave earmarked to them.
During the first year of my MSCF was located at Princeton University, where I together with professor Henrik Kleven made a significant push on our joint project of understanding the role of nurture vs. nature in forming gender preferences using the Danish administrative data (WP1).
During this work, we chose to redirect our research and investigate if the negative impact of children on the labor market outcomes of women originates from the biological links between mother and child. We do so by comparing the labor market trajectories of men and women in biological and adoptive families using event studies around the arrival of children and almost forty years of administrative adoption data from Denmark. We find that short-run child penalties are slightly larger for biological mothers than for adoptive mothers, but their long-run child penalties are virtually identical and precisely estimated. This suggests that biology is not a key driver of child-related gender gaps
This study is completed and published in American Economic Review: Insights. A top journal under the American Economic Association.
During my second year, my focus was on finishing the work packaged laid out in my fellowship proposal, expanding my pedagogical competences and disseminate my work to the broader public. The work has followed closely the plans described in my proposal.
In particular, I have worked on using the institutional setting of the Danish parental leave system to estimate men and women’s willingness to pay for parental leave (WP2) together with associate professor Thomas Jørgensen. He is an expert in designing and estimating economic models, and combining his expertise with my expertise in reduced form and non-parametric estimation, we can use this study to not only quantify gender preferences, but also to perform policy simulations of the coming implementation of EU directive on earmarked parental leave. In particular, we highlight the important role of replacement rates in parental leave systems in determining the allocation leave among parental.
We have finalized the empirical analyses and the paper, and we are now in the process of submitting and revising the paper.
A key objective with my MSCF is to increase my visibility in the economic community by presenting at international academic conferences and at invited seminars at other universities. However, this effort was severely affected by the Covid-19 crisis. Out of 11 scheduled presentations, three were cancelled and seven were moved online. Fortunately, the conference “But some are more equal than others”, where I was invited to give a keynote, was rescheduled to 2021. During my MSCF I gave the following academic presentations:
Date Place
2019-10-23 Princeton Postdoc Seminar
2020-08-20 IIPF Annual Conference
2020-08-26 EEA Annual Conference
2020-12-07 CEBI Lunch Seminar (virtual)
2021-03-07 MCAA Annual Conference Poster Session
2021-03-24 CESifo Area Conference on Public Economics
2021-07-14 University Duisburg-Essen
2021-07-15 Keynote at conference “But some are more equal than others” in Berlin
I have disseminate my work to the broader public in the following ways:
• Presenting and continuous advising the Danish Ministries of Finance and Employment on the behavioral effect of earmarked leave policies. This work has fed into the ministries’ design of the coming implementation of the Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on Work-Life Balance for Parents and Carers.
• Presenting at the Danish 2021 EPRN policy conference (approx. 150 participant from ministries, think tanks, special interest organization and universities).
• I submitted my paper on earmarked leave policies (WP2) as a CESifo working paper, and the paper subsequently selected as a featured working paper in the monthly CESifo newsletter.
During this work, we chose to redirect our research and investigate if the negative impact of children on the labor market outcomes of women originates from the biological links between mother and child. We do so by comparing the labor market trajectories of men and women in biological and adoptive families using event studies around the arrival of children and almost forty years of administrative adoption data from Denmark. We find that short-run child penalties are slightly larger for biological mothers than for adoptive mothers, but their long-run child penalties are virtually identical and precisely estimated. This suggests that biology is not a key driver of child-related gender gaps
This study is completed and published in American Economic Review: Insights. A top journal under the American Economic Association.
During my second year, my focus was on finishing the work packaged laid out in my fellowship proposal, expanding my pedagogical competences and disseminate my work to the broader public. The work has followed closely the plans described in my proposal.
In particular, I have worked on using the institutional setting of the Danish parental leave system to estimate men and women’s willingness to pay for parental leave (WP2) together with associate professor Thomas Jørgensen. He is an expert in designing and estimating economic models, and combining his expertise with my expertise in reduced form and non-parametric estimation, we can use this study to not only quantify gender preferences, but also to perform policy simulations of the coming implementation of EU directive on earmarked parental leave. In particular, we highlight the important role of replacement rates in parental leave systems in determining the allocation leave among parental.
We have finalized the empirical analyses and the paper, and we are now in the process of submitting and revising the paper.
A key objective with my MSCF is to increase my visibility in the economic community by presenting at international academic conferences and at invited seminars at other universities. However, this effort was severely affected by the Covid-19 crisis. Out of 11 scheduled presentations, three were cancelled and seven were moved online. Fortunately, the conference “But some are more equal than others”, where I was invited to give a keynote, was rescheduled to 2021. During my MSCF I gave the following academic presentations:
Date Place
2019-10-23 Princeton Postdoc Seminar
2020-08-20 IIPF Annual Conference
2020-08-26 EEA Annual Conference
2020-12-07 CEBI Lunch Seminar (virtual)
2021-03-07 MCAA Annual Conference Poster Session
2021-03-24 CESifo Area Conference on Public Economics
2021-07-14 University Duisburg-Essen
2021-07-15 Keynote at conference “But some are more equal than others” in Berlin
I have disseminate my work to the broader public in the following ways:
• Presenting and continuous advising the Danish Ministries of Finance and Employment on the behavioral effect of earmarked leave policies. This work has fed into the ministries’ design of the coming implementation of the Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on Work-Life Balance for Parents and Carers.
• Presenting at the Danish 2021 EPRN policy conference (approx. 150 participant from ministries, think tanks, special interest organization and universities).
• I submitted my paper on earmarked leave policies (WP2) as a CESifo working paper, and the paper subsequently selected as a featured working paper in the monthly CESifo newsletter.
In particular, my work in WP2 holds direct policy insights that would be relevant for the coming implementation of earmarked parental leave (see above).