SWS-seminarium: Pilar Gonalons-Pons (University of Pennsylvania)

Seminarium

Datum: tisdag 21 maj 2024

Tid: 13.00 – 14.15

Plats: SOFI

Pilar Gonalons-Pons (University of Pennsylvania) presenterar sin forskning under Stratifiering, välfärd och socialpolitik (SWS)-seminarium, vid Institutet för social forskning (SOFI).

Pilar Gonalons-Pons (University of Pennsylvania) presenterar sin forskning under Stratifiering, välfärd och socialpolitik (SWS)-seminarium, vid Institutet för social forskning (SOFI).

Detta seminarium hålls på plats, det går inte att delta via länk.

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Care Labor Demand Shocks and Inequality: How Childcare Costs Exacerbate Inequality among American Families
 
Care infrastructures are essential for supporting families and enabling women’s participation in the labor market, but they also have implications for family income inequality. This article examines access to childcare services in the US as a case study. We propose that market-priced childcare systems generate inequalities in how births impact mothers’ contributions to family income and aggravate family income inequality as a result. Using the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) merged with state-level childcare prices, we estimate individual fixed effects regression models for the consequences of births on family income and on its proximate determinants: mothers’ labor supply and earnings, and partners’ labor supply and earnings. Our models include state and year fixed effects and identify the impact of childcare costs from within-state variation in childcare prices. We find that childcare prices increase post-birth earnings losses for mothers without college degrees, but not for mothers with college degrees, and that these losses are not compensated for by increases in partners’ earnings or income transfers. As a result, childcare costs exacerbate family income gaps between women with and without a college degree by 39 percentage points.