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Which Mothers Pay a Higher Price? Education Differences in Motherhood Wage Penalties by Parity and Fertility Timing

By on December 19, 2019 in Articles

Catherine Doren

Sociological Science December 19, 2019
10.15195/v6.a26

Abstract
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Upon becoming mothers, women often experience a wage decline—a “motherhood wage penalty.” Recent scholarship suggests the penalty’s magnitude differs by educational attainment. Yet education is also predictive of when women have children and how many they have, which can affect the wage penalty’s size too. Using fixed-effects models and data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, I estimate heterogeneous effects of motherhood by parity and by age at births, considering how these relationships differ by education. For college graduates, first births were associated with a small wage penalty overall, but the penalty was larger for earlier first births and declined with higher ages at first birth. Women who delayed fertility until their mid-30s reaped a premium. Second and third births were associated with wage penalties. Less educated women instead faced a wage penalty at all births and delaying fertility did not minimize the penalty.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Catherine Doren: Office of Population Research and Center for Research on Child Wellbeing, Princeton University
E-mail: cdoren@princeton.edu

Acknowledgements: This research was supported by a core grant to the Center for Demography and Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (P2C HD047873) and a training grant (T32 HD07014) awarded to the Center for Demography and Ecology by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development. Thanks to Christine Schwartz, Myra Marx Ferree, Eric Grodsky, Sasha Killewald, Kathy Lin, Sara McLanahan, Christine Percheski, and Tim Smeeding for helpful feedback on past drafts of this article.

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Doren, Catherine. 2019. “Which Mothers Pay a Higher Price? Education Differences in Motherhood Wage Penalties by Parity and Fertility Timing.” Sociological Science 6: 684-709.
  • Received: October 23, 2019
  • Accepted: November 18, 2019
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Sarah Soule
  • DOI: 10.15195/v6.a26


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Income Inequality and Education

By on August 26, 2015 in Articles

Richard Breen, Inkwan Chung

Sociological Science, August 26, 2015
DOI 10.15195/v2.a22

Abstract
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Many commentators have seen the growing gap in earnings and income between those with a college education and those without as a major cause of increasing inequality in the United States and elsewhere. In this article we investigate the extent to which increasing the educational attainment of the US population might ameliorate inequality. We use data from NLSY79 and carry out a three-level decomposition of total inequality into within-person, between-person and between-education parts. We find that the between-education contribution to inequality is small, even when we consider only adjusted inequality that omits the within-person component. We carry out a number of simulations to gauge the likely impact on inequality of changes in the distribution of education and of a narrowing of the differences in average incomes between those with different levels of education. We find that any feasible educational policy is likely to have only a minor impact on income inequality.
Richard Breen:  Nuffield College and Department of Sociology, University of Oxford.   Email: richard.breen@nuffield.ox.ac.uk

Inkwan Chung: Department of Sociology, Yale University.  Email: inkwan.chung@yale.edu

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Breen, Richard, and Inkwan Chung. 2015. “Income Inequality and Education.” Sociological Science 2: 454-477.
  • Received: April 3, 2015.
  • Accepted: April 19, 2015.
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Stephen Morgan
  • DOI: 10.15195/v2.a22

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Heterogeneous Causal Effects and Sample Selection Bias

By on July 8, 2015 in Articles

Richard Breen, Seongsoo Choi, Anders Holm

Sociological Science, July 8, 2015
DOI 10.15195/v2.a17

Abstract
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The role of education in the process of socioeconomic attainment is a topic of long standing interest to sociologists and economists. Recently there has been growing interest not only in estimating the average causal effect of education on outcomes such as earnings, but also in estimating how causal effects might vary over individuals or groups. In this paper we point out one of the under-appreciated hazards of seeking to estimate heterogeneous causal effects: conventional selection bias (that is, selection on baseline differences) can easily be mistaken for heterogeneity of causal effects. This might lead us to find heterogeneous effects when the true effect is homogenous, or to wrongly estimate not only the magnitude but also the sign of heterogeneous effects. We apply a test for the robustness of heterogeneous causal effects in the face of varying degrees and patterns of selection bias, and we illustrate our arguments and our method using National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) data.
 
Richard Breen: Department of Sociology, Yale University.  Email: richard.breen@yale.edu

Seongsoo Choi: Department of Sociology, Yale University. Email: seongsoo.choi@yale.edu

Anders Holm: Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen. Email: ah@soc.ku.dk

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Breen, Richard, Seongsoo Choi and Anders Holm. 2015. “Heterogeneous Causal Effects and Sample Selection Bias.” Sociological Science 2: 351-369.
  • Received: November 4, 2014.
  • Accepted: January 15, 2015
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Stephen L. Morgan
  • DOI: 10.15195/v2.a17

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