The Child Penalty in the Labor Market: Working Hours and Joint Career Choices

最近的文献确定，父母身份是两性薪酬差距的主要驱动因素。除了增加家庭的经济需求外，孩子的到来还要求父母在家里花费大量时间。这些改变了的需求对父母在劳动力市场上的共同选择产生了重大影响，他们往往决定要么专门从事工作，要么专门从事育儿活动。为了帮助父母兼顾工作和照顾子女，一些发达国家规定了从全日制转为非全日制的权利。然而，这些政策并没有完全满足工作时间灵活性的要求。当工作中很难改变时间表时，那些转向非全时工作的人（主要是妇女）在孩子长大后很难回到全时工作（所谓的非全时陷阱）。在这个项目中，我们将量化灵活的工作时间安排在多大程度上影响夫妻在劳动力市场上的机会和选择，以及公司的招聘和工资决定，以及这些调整如何共同影响儿童惩罚。我们将建立一个定量的联合家庭搜索均衡模型与异质工作时间，一个方面的工作合同，这是经常被忽视的文献。我们将使用这个结构模型来评估时间灵活性的替代制度设置如何影响男性和女性生命周期的劳动力市场模式，以及哪些是主要的机制。由于联合家庭搜索模型中均衡工资分布的特征仍然缺乏，我们将专门为此理论分析提供一个具体的工作包。此外，我们还将对最近德国实施的过渡性非全日制改革的效果进行实证评估。过渡性非全日制改革是指在临时缩短劳动时间后，恢复到原来的劳动时间的权利。我们将利用差异中的差异方法，为大型企业引入这一政策。这些发现也可以用于验证我们的结构模型。

Recent literature identifies parenthood as the main driver of the gender pay gap. In addition to increasing the financial needs of a household, the arrival of a child requests parents to spend a large amount of time at home. These changed necessities impact substantially the joint labor market choices of parents, who often decide to specialize in either work or childcare activities. To help parents reconciling work careers with childcare, several developed countries introduced the right of transiting from full-time to part-time schedules. However, these policies do not fully address the request for flexibility in working hours. When it is hard to change schedules within the job, those switching to a part-time schedule (mainly women) face difficulties in returning to a full-time schedule when the children grow older (the so-called part-time trap). In this project, we will quantify the extent to which flexible hours arrangements impact couples’ opportunities and choices in the labor market, as well as the firms’ hiring and wage decisions, and how these adjustments jointly affect the child penalty. We will develop a quantitative joint household search equilibrium model with heterogeneous working hours, an aspect of the job contract that is often overlooked in the literature. We will use this structural model to assess how alternative institutional set-ups in temporal flexibility influence male and female life-cycle labor market patterns, and which are the main mechanisms at work. Since the characterization of equilibrium wage distributions in joint household search models is still lacking, we will devote a specific work package to this theoretical analysis. In addition, we will empirically evaluate the effect of a recent bridge part-time reform in Germany that introduced the right of reducing working hours temporarily and going back to previous working hours afterwards. We will utilize a difference-in-difference approach by exploiting the introduction of this policy for larger firms. These findings can also be used for validation of our structural model.