ON-LINE

Colloquium Carlos Gil-Hernández | Reunión-Unirse | Microsoft Teams

Meeting ID: 330 803 499 255 472
Passcode: S2Fr6ib7

Abstract

This seminar combines two studies examining how income shapes parenthood and how parenthood reshapes income through the child penalty. Both apply couple-level analyses to longitudinal Italian tax records (2003–2022) to test specialization against competing theories in a traditional Southern European context. Before parenthood, specialization predicts that higher male (female) income facilitates (deters) first births through sex-based opportunity costs, while resource-pooling accounts predict that partners’ incomes facilitate parenthood. Discrete-time event-history models support resource pooling: men’s and women’s incomes raise first-birth probabilities, peaking among dual-high-earner couples. After birth, specialization predicts that the partner with fewer prebirth resources absorbs the child penalty through gender-neutral comparative advantage, while doing-gender perspectives posit that parenthood (re)activates traditional gendered care and economic provision regardless of prebirth bargaining power. Dynamic difference-in-differences estimates show that, five years after birth, the within-couple women-to-men income ratio remains 21% below the counterfactual—estimated from reweighted not-yet-parent couples—and never reverses, even when women hold a prebirth advantage in either education or income. Together, women’s economic resources facilitate parenthood but do not protect their careers, challenging specialization theories and highlighting the policy relevance of economic security before parenthood and support for mothers’ work–family reconciliation after birth.