Child Penalty and Marriage Dissolution
This paper investigates how marital status influences child penalties — defined as the negative labour market outcomes mothers face following the birth of a child. It is the first to explore this relationship using administrative data. The findings reveal that mothers experience substantial and persistent penalties in employment and earnings for up to seven years after childbirth. In contrast, fathers' labour market outcomes remain largely unchanged. For mothers who divorced within seven years after the birth of their first child, employment returned to pre-birth levels.