Research

Research shows that men earn a wage premium from fatherhood, whereas women receive a wage penalty from motherhood. However, less understood is how this fatherhood wage premium evolves over the life course. Standard theories of the fatherhood wage premium collectively suggest a premium that grows over time, but prior research has not tested this prediction. Also, there exists substantial instability in U.S. fathers’ co-residential status with children. If the wage premium grows only so long as men live with their children, continuing residential fatherhood may act to stratify wage trajectories among men. 

In this project, I investigate how fathers’ stable co-residence with a biological child increases their wages over the life course. Using data from the NLSY79 and marginal structural models for repeated outcomes, I test if the fatherhood wage premium grows with time starting with the birth of a resident child, and if it stops growing once fathers no longer live with a child. Both scenarios are supported in my data. Therefore, the wage premium is better understood as a cumulative process rather than a one-time bonus, contingent on fathers’ co-residence with a child. Additionally, I argue that the valorization of the breadwinning role of residential fathers, coupled with the instability of fathers’ residential contexts, operates to stratify wage trajectories among men by yielding privileges to those who remain residential fathers.

A long-standing challenge in analyzing temporally structured data is that it is statistically impossible to separate the effects of age, period (calendar year), and cohort (birth year). This is because each of these temporal scales is always known based on the other two (e.g., Period = Age + Cohort). The same challenge exists for analyzing group differences in APC effects that shape cross-group disparities in any outcome of interest. 

With Ethan Fosse and Christopher Winship, I develop an age-period-cohort (APC) method specifically designed for analyzing cross-group disparities. We achieve partial identification of each temporal effect on a group disparity by focusing on identifying (1) the range of APC effects and (2) group differences in these temporal effects on an outcome instead of the effects for each group. In many cases, even a minimal set of theoretical assumptions may generate a narrow (i.e., highly informative) range of each temporal effect.

To illustrate our approach, we engage with a puzzle about the changing gender pay gap: Why has progress slowed since 1990, following rapid gains in women’s relative pay in the 1980s? Using our method and the CPS annual supplement data from 1976 to 2019,  and under a limited set of theoretical assumptions, our analysis shows that—despite ongoing progresses driven by cohort replacement—yearly improvements in women’s relative pay across all cohorts (i.e., period effects) began to stall after the 1980s. This has contributed to the deceleration of pay convergence. The results challenge the dominant explanation that attributes the slowing progress in pay equity to the influence of human capital levels among the newly entering cohort of the female workforce (i.e., cohort effects).

Social demographers have argued that when mothers' rigid household responsibilities are not on par with their socioeconomic achievements in the labor market, it suppresses women's higher-order fertility. With Sinn Won Han and Mary C. Brinton, we validate this argument. Our major contribution is to illuminate the normative foundation of mothers' work-family incompatibility. Using data drawn from 25 European countries, we find that it is a combination of gender-egalitarianism in paid labor (i.e., support of maternal employment) and gender-essentialist ideology endorsing mother’s caretaking role—which we call egalitarian familism—that leads to lower second birth intentions, especially among full-time employed mothers. This association is significant even net of individual mothers' share of household labor relative to their male partner, highlighting the importance of our focus on multidimensional gender-role ideology.