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

最近的文献认为，为人父母是造成性别薪酬差距的主要原因。除了增加家庭的经济需求外，孩子的到来还要求父母花大量的时间在家里。这些变化的必需品极大地影响了父母在联合劳动力市场上的选择，他们往往决定专门从事工作或育儿活动。为了帮助父母兼顾工作和照看孩子，几个发达国家引入了从全职到兼职的过渡权利。然而，这些政策并没有完全解决工作时间灵活性的要求。当在工作中很难改变时间表时，那些转向兼职时间表的人(主要是女性)在孩子长大后回到全职时间表时会面临困难(所谓的兼职陷阱)。在这个项目中，我们将量化灵活的工作时间安排对夫妇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的影响程度，以及这些调整如何共同影响儿童罚款。我们将开发一个具有不同工作时间的定量联合家庭寻找均衡模型，这是工作合同中经常被文献忽视的一个方面。我们将使用这一结构模型来评估时间灵活性方面的替代制度设置如何影响男性和女性生命周期劳动力市场模式，以及哪些机制起作用。由于目前尚缺乏对联户寻找模型中均衡工资分布的刻画，因此我们将专门对这一理论进行分析。此外，我们将对德国最近一项过渡性兼职改革的效果进行实证评估，该改革引入了暂时减少工作时间并在之后恢复到以前工作时间的权利。我们将利用针对大公司的这一政策的引入，利用差异中的差异方法。这些发现也可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.