Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/282796 
Year of Publication: 
2023
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 16669
Publisher: 
Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
Why do women experience a persistent drop in labor earnings upon becoming mothers, i.e. a "child penalty"? We study a new mechanism: search frictions. We analyze data on job applications sent on a popular online platform linked with administrative data for 350,000 involuntarily unemployed workers in France. First, we highlight differences in job search behavior between mothers and similar women with no children. Mothers send 12.2% fewer job applications and are more selective regarding wage and non-wage amenities. Consistently, they have a lower job finding rate. Second, we analyze the exact time when applications are sent and highlight differences in the timing of job search. We find that mothers' rate of applications decreases by 20.3% in the hours and days when there is no school. We also show that mothers responded to a reform that introduced school on Wednesday by smoothing their search across weekdays and narrowing their search timing gap with other women. In a simple search model, we show that our results imply that mothers both face lower incentives and higher costs to search. We conclude that search frictions disproportionately prevent mothers from improving their labor market situation and contribute to the child penalty.
Subjects: 
job search
gender inequality
time allocation
child penalty
JEL: 
J16
J22
J64
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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