Chart of the Day: Job Changing Post-Parenthood (in a bunch of countries)
I spent much of the last two days attending the virtual edition of the Society of the Economics of the Household (SEHO) conference, which was excellent. Very well organized and lots of interesting papers. So, I have plenty to choose from for my chart of the day. I want to share a figure from “Motherhood, Labor Market Trajectories, and the Allocation of Talent: Harmonized Evidence on 29 Countries” which was presented by Matilde Machado and was written by Inés Berniell, Lucila Berniell, Dolores de la Mata, María Edo, Yarine Fawaz, Matilde P. Machado, and Mariana Marchionni.
They show the motherhood penalty in employment that lots of other papers have shown, though they are able to compare across 29 countries. But they look at some outcome variables that are not always available in the administrative earnings data used for the typical motherhood penalty paper: part-time employment, self-employment, and number of jobs/job stability.
In all of these measures, we see women less attached to wage and salary employment after having a child. The number of jobs as a measure of job stability is particularly interesting to me, in part because I can look at that measure in my U.S. administrative earnings data and had not previously thought to measure it.
The data used here is the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), which allows for the cross-country comparisons. The drawback of the data relative to administrative earnings data is that the questions about job market experience are retrospective. I am not familiar with this dataset, since my research focuses on the U.S., but Machado says that it is a well-used dataset and the retrospective job market variables compare favorably to more contemporaneous measures. They focus on these labor supply variables, rather than an earnings measure, because labor supply choices are less vulnerable to recall bias.
The presentation/paper had a bunch of additional interesting figures, showing cross-country comparisons of these outcomes and the size of these outcomes across individual characteristics. The cross-country comparisons in particular are feasible with this dataset in a way that wouldn’t be easily done with datasets with contemporary measures of labor supply.