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Author: Winder, Katie L.
Resulting in 2 citations.
1. Winder, Katie L.
Essays on Motherhood, Wages, and Labor Supply
Ph.D. Dissertation, The Johns Hopkins University, 2007. DAI-A 67/11, May 2007
Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79
Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT)
Keyword(s): Child Care; Fertility; Head Start; Labor Supply; Maternal Employment; Modeling, Instrumental Variables; Motherhood; Mothers, Income; Propensity Scores; Wage Determination; Wages, Women

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

This thesis explores the effect of motherhood on women's wages and labor supply decisions. The first essay investigates the motherhood wage penalty, or the unexplained portion of the wage gap between mothers and non-mothers after controlling for observable characteristics. Rather than a causal effect, the observed penalty could be due to the presence of unobserved heterogeneity, endogeneity, or sample selection that bias OLS estimates. To investigate this, I apply the fixed effects estimator with instrumental variables (FE/IV) to panel data from the NLSY for the years 1988-1998. Using mainly state or local variables as instruments to predict fertility and work experience, I find that the motherhood wage penalty becomes insignificant for both white and black women. This finding is confirmed using when mothers are grouped by education or child's age. In addition, the possibility of selection bias into employment is considered using Wooldridge's (1995) technique for panel data.

The second essay asks whether government-provided child care increases the employment of mothers. I use NLSY Head Start enrollment data to calculate non-experimental estimators of the average treatment effect of participation on the mother's employment, including matching and weighting on the propensity score. I find no statistically significant effect of the treatment on employment using these methods, a finding confirmed by using several comparison groups. In addition, negative and significant effects are found for white mothers. However, using a regression discontinuity (RD) design resulted in small positive effects of Head Start participation for mothers' employment growth (5%) for some sample restrictions, but no effect using other samples. For those mothers participating in welfare, some sample restrictions using RD resulted in a larger positive effect of Head Start of 8%. The RD estimates differ substantially from those of the matching and weighting estimators, which could suggest that the latter do not fully remove the selection bias.

Bibliography Citation
Winder, Katie L. Essays on Motherhood, Wages, and Labor Supply. Ph.D. Dissertation, The Johns Hopkins University, 2007. DAI-A 67/11, May 2007.
2. Winder, Katie L.
Is There a Mommy Track? Occupational Skill and Childbearing
Working Paper, School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts, University of California - Merced, March 2010.
Also: http://faculty.ucmerced.edu/kwinder/research.html
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: University of California - Merced
Keyword(s): Cognitive Ability; Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT); Gender Differences; Job Characteristics; Job Skills; Maternal Employment; Motherhood; Mothers, Income; Occupations; Wage Determination; Wages, Women

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

It is well established that mothers earn less than childless women, even after controlling for differences in human capital. We investigate whether this is partially due to declines in the skill level of new parents' occupations, and whether a decline can be attributed to within-occupation constraints, e.g. hours or stress. We find little change in math skills for new fathers but a sizable decrease for mothers, particularly women with multiple children and highly educated women, much of which is explained by occupational attributes. This translates into lower wages as well, accounting for up to 10% of the motherhood wage gap.
Bibliography Citation
Winder, Katie L. "Is There a Mommy Track? Occupational Skill and Childbearing." Working Paper, School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts, University of California - Merced, March 2010.