Navigation

You are here: Home › Event Study

Tag Archives | Event Study

What You Need to Know When Estimating Monthly Impact Functions: Comment on Hudde and Jacob, “There’s More in the Data!”

By on December 4, 2025 in Articles

Josef Brüderl, Ansgar Hudde, Marita Jacob

Sociological Science December 4, 2025
10.15195/v12.a34

Abstract

PDF (469 views)
0 Citation


In life course research, it is common practice to analyze the effects of life events on outcomes. This is usually done by estimating “impact functions.” To date, most studies have estimated yearly impact functions. However, Hudde and Jacob (2023) (hereafter H&J) pointed out that most panel data sets include information on the month of events. Consequently, they proposed exploiting this information by estimating monthly impact functions. In this adversarial collaboration, we address two issues regarding H&J’s work. First, H&J did not provide sufficient guidance on how to estimate monthly impact functions. We will provide a step-by-step description of how to do so. Second, the procedure H&J proposed for smoothing monthly estimates produces confidence intervals (CIs) that are likely too narrow. This can lead to misleading conclusions. Therefore, we suggest using more appropriate bootstrapped CIs.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Josef Brüderl: Department of Sociology, LMU Munich. E-mail: bruederl@lmu.de
Ansgar Hudde: Department of Sociology and Social Psychology, University of Cologne.
E-mail: hudde@wiso.uni-koeln.de
Marita Jacob: Department of Sociology and Social Psychology, University of Cologne.
E-mail: marita.jacob@uni-koeln.de

Acknowledgments: We thank Katrin Auspurg for her helpful comments. This article uses data from the German Family Panel pairfam, coordinated by Josef Brüderl, Sonja Drobniˇc, Karsten Hank, Johannes Huinink, Bernhard Nauck, Franz J. Neyer, and Sabine Walper. From 2004 to 2022, pairfam was funded as a priority program and a long-term project by the German Research Foundation (DFG).


Reproducibility Package: Stata replication code is available on the Open Science Framework (OSF), https://osf.io/kx9ne/ (file: “Monthly Impact Functions-Replication File.zip”). The replication file includes the prepared pairfam data that we used for all of our analyses. If you would like to reproduce our data preparation (also included in the replication file), you can order the pairfam data at https://www.pairfam.de/en/data/data-access/.

  • Citation: Brüderl, Josef, Ansgar Hudde, Marita Jacob. 2025. “What You Need to Know When Estimating Monthly Impact Functions: Comment on Hudde and Jacob, “There’s More in the Data!”” Sociological Science 12: 862-870.
  • Received: May 16, 2025
  • Accepted: August 31, 2025
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Kristian B. Karlson
  • DOI: 10.15195/v12.a34

0

Money, Birth, Gender: Explaining Unequal Earnings Trajectories following Parenthood

By on May 17, 2023 in Articles

Weverthon Machado, Eva Jaspers

Sociological Science May 17, 2023
10.15195/v10.a14

Abstract

PDF (2784 views)
0 Citation


Using population register data from the Netherlands, we analyze the child penalty for new parents in three groups of couples: different-sex and female same-sex couples with a biological child and different-sex couples with an adopted child. With a longitudinal design, we follow parents’ earnings from two years before to eight years after the arrival of the child and use event study models to estimate the effects of the transition to parenthood on earnings trajectories. Comparing different groups of couples allows us to test hypotheses related to three types of within-couple differences that are difficult to disentangle when studying only heterosexual biological parents: relative earnings, childbearing, and gender. Our results offer strong support for gender as the main driver of divergent child penalties. The gender of their partners is more consequential for mothers’ earnings trajectories than is childbearing or the pre-parenthood relative earnings in the couple.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Weverthon Machado: Corresponding author. Department of Sociology, Utrecht University
E-mail: w.barbosamachado@uu.nl

Eva Jaspers: Department of Sociology, Utrecht University
E-mail: e.jaspers@uu.nl

Acknowledgments: We are grateful for valuable feedback from members of the GENPARENT project, namely, Marie Evertsson, Maaike van der Vleuten, Ylva Moberg, Allison Geerts, and Madeleine Eriksson Kirsch. Previous versions of his article were presented at theWork and Family seminar of the Department of Sociology at Utrecht University, the Inter-university Working Group on Social Inequality and Life Courses (ISOL), the Work and Family Researchers Network (WFRN) conference 2022, the European Population Conference (EPC) 2022, the European Consortium for Sociological Research (ECSR) conference 2022, and the ODISSEI Conference for Social Science in the Netherlands 2022. We thank participants in these sessions for their comments and suggestions.

Funding: This work was funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, ERC Consolidator Grant (no. 771770) awarded to principal investigator Marie Evertsson. We also benefited from the support of ODISSEI, the Open Data Infrastructure for Social Science and Economic Innovations.

Data availability: We use population register data provided by Statistics Netherlands. The data are not publicly available, but interested researchers can, subject to eligibility, apply for access. See instructions at https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/onze-diensten/customised-services-microdata/microdata-conducting-your-own-research. Code for reproducing our analyses is available at https://osf.io/gmcjv/.

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Machado, Weverthon, and Eva Jaspers. 2023. “Money, Birth, Gender: Explaining Unequal Earnings Trajectories following Parenthood.” Sociological Science 10: 429-453.
  • Received: January 3, 2023
  • Accepted: March 21, 2023
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Vida Maralani
  • DOI: 10.15195/v10.a14


0
SiteLock