The Family Gap Reconsidered: What Wombmates Reveal

We shed new light on the effects of having children on hourly wages by exploiting access to data on the entire population of employed twins in Denmark. In addition we use administrative data on absenteeism; the amount of hours off due to holidays and sickness. Our results suggest that childbearing reduces female hourly wages but the principal explanation is in fact mothers’ higher levels of absence. We find a positive wage premium for fathers both when applying OLS on the entire population of Danes and when imposing twin fixed effects in the twin sample.