cover image: The Child Penalty in the Netherlands and its Determinants

20.500.12592/hj4q4m

The Child Penalty in the Netherlands and its Determinants

10 Jun 2021

The OECD reports that in 2018, men earned 13% more than women in the Netherlands (OECD, 2021).1 While differences in education between men and women were one of the main drivers of the gender wage gap in the second half of the 20th century, the remaining largest contributors to the gap nowadays is driven by women reducing paid work to care for their children and by men not doing so (Blau and Kahn,. [...] The child penalty represents the percentage change in the outcome due to the child, and is computed as follows, with ŷqit the predicted value at event time q: ỹqit − ŷ q it α̂qPq = q = q (2)ỹit ỹit The child penalty Pq specifies the percentage gain/loss in the labour market outcome due to the child compared to people of the same gender and cohort without children yet. [...] In order to assess the effect of the expansion on the child penalty, we estimate the same model as before on different groups: (i) for mothers whose children were born before the expansion (between -5 and -3) and after the expansion (between +1 and +3) and (ii) separately for the control and treatment group. [...] Figure 12 shows the correlation between religiosity and the child penalty on municipal level: the higher the religiosity, the larger the child penalty. [...] We can however infer from the comparison between the participation and earnings penalties that participation is driving the difference between Morocco-Turkey and the other groups, and that the more frequent use of part-time work for native Dutch mothers explain the higher earnings penalty for this group.19 How can we explain the difference in child penalty observed for those groups? We con- sider.

Authors

CPB

Pages
47
Published in
Netherlands

Tables

All