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Rellstab_2023_Appl Economics_Gender norms
Journal article

Gender norms and the child penalty : evidence from the Dutch bible belt

  • 2023
Published in:
  • Applied economics. - 2023, vol. 56, no. 45, p. 5428–5441
Child penalty
Parenthood
Gender norms
Division of labour in the household
English There are substantial gender gaps in earnings once children are born in many developed countries, despite similar education levels of men and women and accessible childcare facilities. I examine whether gender norms are a driver of women’s higher labour market costs of having children using Dutch administrative data. Exploiting large local variation in gender norms in the Netherlands, I compare parents from the Dutch bible belt, where gender norms are on average less egalitarian, with parents from other regions in the Netherlands, where gender norms are more egalitarian. My findings show that having children leads an about 30% larger earnings decrease for women in the bible belt, mainly driven by a larger reduction in working hours. I rule out that differences in pre-child parental characteristics and institutions such as childcare availability explain this result and argue that different gender norms in these two areas likely explain this finding.
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Language
  • English
Classification
Economics
License
CC BY-NC-ND
Open access status
hybrid
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://n2t.net/ark:/12658/srd1330204
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