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Author: Shen, Jenny
Resulting in 2 citations.
1. Kuziemko, Ilyana
Pan, Jessica
Shen, Jenny
Washington, Ebonya
The Mommy Effect: Do Women Anticipate the Employment Effects of Motherhood?
NBER Working Paper No. 24740, National Bureau of Economic Research, June 2018.
Also: http://nber.org/papers/w24740
Cohort(s): NLSY79, Young Women
Publisher: National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
Keyword(s): British Household Panel Survey (BHPS); Cross-national Analysis; Gender Attitudes/Roles; Maternal Employment; Motherhood; Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID); Wage Penalty/Career Penalty

After decades of convergence, the gender gap in employment outcomes has recently plateaued in many rich countries, despite the fact that women have increased their investment in human capital over this period. We propose a hypothesis to reconcile these two trends: that when they are making key human capital decisions, women in modern cohorts underestimate the impact of motherhood on their future labor supply. Using an event-study framework, we show substantial and persistent employment effects of motherhood in U.K. and U.S. data. We then provide evidence that women do not anticipate these effects. Upon becoming parents, women (and especially more educated women) adopt more negative views toward female employment (e.g., they are more likely to say that women working hurts family life), suggesting that motherhood serves as an information shock to their beliefs. Women on average (and, again, more educated women in particular) report that parenthood is harder than they expected. We then look at longer horizons--are young women's expectations about future labor supply correct when they make their key educational decisions? In fact, female high school seniors are increasingly and substantially overestimating the likelihood they will be in the labor market in their thirties, a sharp reversal from previous cohorts who substantially underestimated their future labor supply. Finally, we specify a model of women's choice of educational investment in the face of uncertain employment costs of motherhood, which demonstrates that our results can be reconciled only if these costs increased unexpectedly across generations. We end by documenting a collage of empirical evidence consistent with such a trend.
Bibliography Citation
Kuziemko, Ilyana, Jessica Pan, Jenny Shen and Ebonya Washington. "The Mommy Effect: Do Women Anticipate the Employment Effects of Motherhood?" NBER Working Paper No. 24740, National Bureau of Economic Research, June 2018.
2. Shen, Jenny
Essays in the Economics of Gender
Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, Princeton University, 2020
Cohort(s): NLSY79, Young Women
Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT)
Keyword(s): British Household Panel Survey (BHPS); Expectations/Intentions; Human Capital; Maternal Employment; Motherhood; Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID)

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

Chapter 3, co-authored with Ilyana Kuziemko, Jessica Pan, and Ebonya Washington, examines the empirical puzzle of why women's labor force participation rates have stalled, despite women's increasing investment in human capital. We propose a hypothesis to reconcile these two trends: that when they are making key human capital decisions, women in modern cohorts underestimate the impact of motherhood on their future labor supply. Using an event-study framework, we show substantial and persistent employment effects of motherhood in U.K. and U.S. data. We then provide evidence that women do not anticipate these effects. Upon becoming parents, women (and especially more educated women) adopt more negative views toward female employment (e.g., they are more likely to say that women working hurts family life), suggesting that motherhood serves as an information shock to their beliefs. We then look at longer horizons--are young women's expectations about future labor supply correct when they make their key educational decisions? In fact, female high school seniors are increasingly and substantially overestimating the likelihood they will be in the labor market in their thirties, a sharp reversal from previous cohorts who substantially underestimated their future labor supply.
Bibliography Citation
Shen, Jenny. Essays in the Economics of Gender. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, Princeton University, 2020.