Each year, an article from each American Economic Journal is selected from nominated articles for the AEJ Best Paper Award. This year, a paper by Princeton Economics Professor Henrik Kleven, LSE Professor Camille Landais, and Jakob Egholt Søgaard, currently a post-doc researcher at Princeton, won the award for best paper in AEJ: Applied Economics.
The paper, titled Children and Gender Inequality: Evidence from Denmark, uses Danish administrative data to study the impacts of children on gender inequality in the labor market. The researchers find that the arrival of children creates a long-run gender gap in earnings of around 20 percent driven by hours worked, participation, and wage rates. The authors identify mechanisms driving these “child penalties” in terms of occupation, sector, and firm choices and find that the fraction of gender inequality caused by child penalties has featured a dramatic increase over the last three to four decades. The research also shows that child penalties are transmitted through generations, from parents to daughters, suggesting an influence of childhood environment on gender identity.
The department congratulates Kleven, Landais, and Søgaard on this acknowledgment of their impressive work.