NRSE Lecture by Dr. Christian Zimpelmann
You are invited to join the Nuremberg Research Seminar in Economics (NRSE) on June 19, 2024 from 1:15 pm to 2:45 pm. The seminar will be held at the FAU WiSo, Lange Gasse 20, Room 0.423. The guest speaker Christian Zimpelmann (IZA – Institute of Labor Economics) will be talking about „How Gender Role Attitudes Shape Maternal Labor Supply”.
More information can be found here:
We examine the influence of gender role attitudes, specifically views about the appropriate role of mothers, on post-childbirth employment decisions. German panel data reveals that mothers with traditional attitudes are 15% less likely to work during early motherhood than their egalitarian counterparts. Differences also emerge at the intensive margin and are persistent for at least seven years. Fathers’ attitudes also predict maternal labor supply, highlighting joint decision-making within couples. Examining the interaction of attitudes with policies, we find that the introduction of a cash-for-care payment for parents who abstain from using public childcare substantially reduced the labor supply of traditional mothers, whereas egalitarian mothers’ labor supply remained unaffected. To examine counterfactual policy changes, we estimate a dynamic model of female labor supply that incorporates human capital accumulation and, as a novel feature, heterogeneity by gender attitudes. Labor supply elasticities are substantially larger for traditional mothers, while a policy facilitating full-time childcare access has a more pronounced effect on egalitarian mothers. Our findings stress that gender role attitudes moderate the impact of policies, which implies that measured average policy effects depend on the distribution of attitudes and, hence, cannot easily be transferred over time or to other countries.
The Chair of Social Policy thanks the FAU WiSo alumni association, Alumni & Freunde WiSo Nürnberg e.V. for their support of this guest lecture as well as for their generous and on-going support of many other events and projects at the FAU WiSo. Visit the AFWN website for more information and to become a member.