Documents Rege, Mari 2 results

"This paper investigates how mothers' decision to stay at home with young children affects their subsequent work careers. Identification is based on the introduction of the Cash-for-Care program in Norway in 1998, which increased mothers' incentives to withdraw from the labor market when their child was one and two years old. Our estimates demonstrate that, for mothers without a university degree or with pre-reform earnings below the median, the program had effects on earnings and full-time employment even when the child was no longer eligible for Cash-for-Care at ages four and five. However, from age six, we can no longer see any effects. Further analysis suggests that the effects dissipate because most mothers remained attached to the labor force through part-time employment."

"Despite well-documented convergence during the later years of the 20th century, labor force attachment remains markedly higher for men than for women. The current paper employs rich longitudinal registry data to investigate the intergenerational transfer of the gender gap in labor force participation. We explore the extent that family- and community-level characteristics, measured in childhood, differentially predict the likelihood of employment for adult Norwegian men and women. Drawing on theories pertaining to the importance of information, skills and gender norms transfer, our empirical analysis demonstrates that a parsimonious set of family- and community-level characteristics can explain a substantial part of the gender gap. These results suggest that female labor force participation is constrained by the intergenerational transfer of beliefs and expectations about family and work."