The RFBerlin Applied Economics Seminar series brings leading researchers to Berlin to share their latest work and engage with our community. We are pleased to welcome Barbara Petrongolo (University of Oxford) for this session, where he will share her work.

Barbara Petrongolo is Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford, Fellow of the British Academy, and Research Associate at the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics. Her research focuses on gender, labor markets, social policy, and labor economics, with a strong emphasis on the intersection between policy and inequality.

Event Topic:

Labor market dynamics around childbirth: The role of parental leave

with Abi Adams and Mathias Jensen.

We develop new facts on relationships between the timing and spacing of births, parental leave take-up, and labor market outcomes using Danish administrative data. We document substantial heterogeneity in age at first birth across maternal skill levels. Average spacing of pregnancies is also tighter for highly skilled mothers, resulting in higher fertility levels and time on parental leave soon after first birth. We estimate event studies by skill level and find that much of child penalties in earnings and participation after first birth can be explained by incapacitation effects from parental leave around subsequent births, especially for the highly educated.

Event Details:

Date: 19 September 2025
Time: 14:00–15:15

Participation: the seminar is open to the public and targeted to an academic audience.

If you have any questions or need further information, feel free to contact us using the form or email us at [email protected]