Perinatal Family Labour Supply: Historical Trends and the Modern Experience
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The predominant perspective on perinatal family labour supply in the theoretical and empirical economics literature is that careers and children are simultaneous choices, so conditioning on the prenatal career ambitions of individuals, and particularly women, the event of a birth has little or no effect on labour market behaviour. There are, of course, many reasons to believe that this “allor- nothing” view, rooted in assumptions of perfect foresight, overlooks significant labour market effects of children and that due to various trends, including rising correlation in husband-wife earnings, these effects may becoming increasingly important. Using historical Canadian Census data and rich longitudinal microdata, I use nonparametric techniques to identify discontinuities in employment probabilities, hours of work and wage outcomes of parents, and particularly dualcareer couples, in the months just before and after a first birth. The evidence indicates that although the vast majority of new mothers and fathers who were employed prior to birth, maintain that employment, a non-trivial percentage of women (roughly 20%) appear to give up employment entirely after a birth and roughly half of them will not have returned to work 5 years later. More importantly, the percentage that drop out of the labour force is increasing and has been for at least the past two decades. This decrease is particularly evident among more educated and older women. Further, among new mothers and fathers who maintain their employment through the perinatal period, there is evidence of other types of labour supply adjustments including significant decreases (mothers) and increases (fathers) in both usual monthly hours of work and hourly wages. There is also evidence of increased probabilities of job changing in the year just before and after the birth for fathers, but not for mothers. Together these findings provide a much richer perspective on how today’s dual-career families balance work and child rearing. In terms of its policy relevance, the findings emphasize the importance of measures that support parents in balancing work and family time, as opposed to measures that are focused on enabling parents, and particularly women, to maintain uninterrupted careers while raising children.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".